Instead of facing up to their fundamental challenges in livability and economic viability, the Big Apple and other cities like Portland, Seattle, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Minneapolis, and Chicago are falling for full-spectrum progressives. In Tuesday’s local elections, Zohran Mamdani, a socialist running as a Democrat, handily defeated former Gov. Andrew Cuomo, who ran independently after failing to secure the Democratic nomination. Leftist have also scored recent victories in smaller cities like Oakland, Cincinnati, Syracuse, Albany, and Buffalo.     

It’s hard to see how politicians like Mamdani, following the Democratic Socialists’ platform, will  abolish capitalism or implement the “social ownership” of all industry in a still profoundly capitalist country. People, at least outside the bluest cities, may not respond well to progressive ideas about taxing “white” areas, one of Mamdani’s proposals, or regarding the very existence of the NYPD as an obstacle to “queer liberation.”

His defenders insist Mamdani has disavowed such views since he aired them in the febrile Covid-and-BLM era. But his statements from back then, which wasn’t that long ago, give every impression of sincerity; Mamdani — unlike, say, his failed opponent Andrew Cuomo — comes across as an ideological true believer if ever there were one.

The bigger problem is that this abrupt Left turn comes as cities are losing their primacy. Today, core cities account for just 15% of the US population, down from a quarter in 1950. Meanwhile, the suburbs and exurbs have seen explosive growth — accounting for 86% of the metropolitan population, up from 13% at the outset of World War II. Suburban and, especially, exurban dominance of metropolitan growth has only accelerated in recent years.  

More critical still, cities are losing their once-dominant economic role. In 2019, before the pandemic, office construction was a third of the rate of 1985 and half that of 2000. Even large multinational firms, historically anchored in cities like New York and Chicago, are rethinking their real-estate strategies. According to the Financial Times, many companies are planning to reduce their office footprints by 10% to 20%. A study from the University of Chicago found that as much as a third of the urban workforce could operate remotely.

It is precisely these conditions that have helped create a new urban demography favorable to far-Left city politicians like Mamdani. Between 1970 and 2000, notes the Brookings Institution, middle-income areas in core cities dropped 23 percent, down from nearly half, while the majority lived in low- or very-low-income areas. Job losses in manufacturing and middle management, notes MIT economist David Autor, were “overwhelmingly concentrated in urban labor markets.”     

The Big Apple, for example, has lost some 76,000 middle-income jobs since 2020, while upper-income and low-income jobs have grown. This has paralleled the exodus of middle- and working-class ethnics — Italians, Irish, Jews, African Americans, Puerto Ricans — into the suburbs, particularly those with lower prices. Their departure is a blessing for the professional-class Left that backs Mamdani (while remaining middle- and working-class voters largely continued to back Cuomo to the bitter end).

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Burdened with astronomical college debt, these high-education-but-low-wage voters constitute the vanguard of the far Left in many cities. They have largely adopted radical positions hostile to Israel and are seen as threatening to Jews, especially older ones, who once played a dominant role in the city politics.

Onetime rapper and Hollywood nepo baby Mamdani knows well how to appeal to this emergent class. His high-priced proposals for free childcare may seem family-friendly, but many of these voters are unliikely to have children (a majority of Manhattanites are single and have never been married). Socialist campaigners thrive in those places that have far fewer children — gentrified  sectors of Queens and Brooklyn, Chicago’s near northside and trendy swaths of west LA. Those who march under the banner of LGBTQ also play an outsized role in these movements. Mamdani, despite his Muslim background and pro-Palestinian bona fides, romped in heavily gay-friendly parts of Manhattan, Brooklyn, and Queens

What disturbs the young professional class most appears to be  high rents; Gotham takes the highest share of income for housing of any US big city. Mamdani’s programs — rent freezes, free buses, eviction restrictions, and the like — are designed to allow urbanites without the means to remain in the city, rather than join those moving to less costly cities to fulfill their dreams.

Some Leftist pundits see this class-based approach as the path to power, and even as the better substitute for the identity-based politics that dominated progressivism beginning a decade ago. High prices mean that coastal metropolises now suffer the lowest adjusted incomes, even as incomes in the less costly middle of the country remain above the national average. The thinking goes that, by running on “affordability” for this educated precariat, Democrats can regain their electoral footing after the thrashing they received in 2024.

Other economic pressures are radicalizing the hipsters. They face a job market that is  getting tougher — barely half of workers under 30 have full time jobs — even for those with expensive advanced degrees. Their jobs are increasingly threatened by the rise of artificial intelligence, including in finance, business services, and even “creative” professions that historically have clustered in cities.   

Cities, of course, can fight back against these trends by developing policies that encourage urban economic growth, something barely mentioned in the DSA and other Leftist forums. Through reasonable taxation, less regulation, and the nurturing of local high-wage industries, from light manufacturing to video production, an early generation of practically minded urbanists helped restore order and growth. Mayors Rudy Giuliani and Michael Bloomberg in New York, Bob Lanier and Bill White in Houston, Richard Riordan in Los Angeles, Ed Rendell in Philadelphia and Steve Goldsmith in Indianapolis showed how cities can come back.

Today’s urban politics, at least for now, make such a revival unlikely. Chicago’s Brandon Johnson, in office since 2023, was elected by a very Mamdani-like coalition of poor minorities, public employees, and hipster whites. Under Johnson’s steady misrule, schools deteriorate even as he pushes through big raises for teachers and other public employees, leaving the city with an extremely high pension debt.  

Even where reformers have triumphed this decade, as in San Francisco and Seattle, radical forces appear to be once again ascendant. Long a favored destination for college-educated migrants, Seattle during the 2020 riots shut down for weeks and even spawned something of a mini-Havana near its downtown. The city suffers from stubbornly high office-vacancy rates, large numbers of empty stores, and business flight. Crime is down, but hardly back to its pre-2020 levels. The George Floyd Plaza, meant to be some sort of public shrine, remains largely desolate and threatening.

In Portland, another city still reeling from the effects of 2020, socialists are also ascendant, having displaced Republicans as the city’s essential second party, and one with all the momentum. As in Seattle, the local progressives seemed reluctant to police even violence-prone groups like antifa.

Just recently New York Times veteran Nicholas Kristoff blithely dismissed Trumpian assertions about Portland as a crime-cursed dystopia, suggesting that “hell does not serve Pinot Noir this good.”  Of course, not everyone in these cities loves the helmeted kids in black, notably those who have suffered their attacks, including the Seattle police union.

Much the same process appears to be taking place in Minneapolis, which suffered massive  disorder during the “summer of love.” There, Mayor Jacob Frey, after eight years, is deeply unpopular and could lose out to his socialist challenger, Omar Fateh. The race was too close to call as of this writing.

Radical realignment is also unfolding in San Francisco, where since 2020, the city had tacked to the center. Once united in opposition to the progressives, the moderates are now increasingly divided. Now the city’s Board of Supervisors may have a DSA majority within a year or two.

President Trump deserves some blame for the socialist tide. He may well have saved the career of Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass, who impressed few during last year’s fires and continues to disappoint, as the city’s performance in rebuilding has been abysmal at best. The city’s economy may be largely moribund, losing companies at a rapid clip. But Bass’s fervent attacks on ICE agents have helped her galvanize progressive support.  

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Is this the denouement of great cities? Even under socialist rule, big cities like New York will continue to attract young professionals, globe-trotting elites, and cultural creators, as well as some immigrants. In New York, while the overall population has declined, ultra-wealthy residents, boosted by the stock market, continue to spend lavishly at the city’s often absurdly expensive restaurants. Similarly, tourists continue to flood in, gawking at the bright lights, street characters, and remarkable cultural assets built by earlier generations.  

Yet over time, socialist rule may make it impossible for big cities to finance their current costs, much less elaborate schemes for redistribution. Trump and the congressional GOP are unlikely to   give much help with mass transit or to fund new city services. And there remain definite limits to what the rich — notably, those who earn and not just inherit their wealth — will absorb in terms of taxes and public humiliation.

It’s hard to see how cities like New York can expand spending without keeping these people. Between 2011 and 2021, New Yorkers with more than $1 million in adjusted gross income averaged 0.7% of all tax filers, but paid 42.4% of municipal personal Income Tax. Between 2018 and 2022, the city lost some $10 billion in revenues just to south Florida. Even Andrew Cuomo vowed to head to the Sunshine State in case he lost, which, he did.

On the other hand, socialist wins could prove a boon for places like Palm Beach, Fla., which have become beacons for people leaving places like New York and Chicago. Dallas is developing  a stock exchange to rival Wall Street and is eyeing a Mamdani mayoralty as an ideal marketing device. 

Some conservatives might celebrate the radicalization of cities and salivate at the prospect of hard-Left control of the Democratic Party. But they ignore the underlying forces boosting socialism, notably the cost of living and diminished employment prospects for the young, which could also spread beyond the radical cities. Rather than a boon to conservatives, the rise of the radical city constitutes a loss for the country, and can be reversed only by a rebirth of pragmatic reason.

While the Horn of Africa endures some of the worst conditions, huge swathes of the continent experience chaos and deprivation in some degree. To understand the structural reasons for this, we must look at Africa’s cities. Sub-Saharan Africa is undergoing an urban transition of a kind unique in history. Though it is currently the world’s least urbanized region, with slightly less than half of its 1.4 billion people living in cities, that proportion is climbing rapidly, driven by phenomenal birth rates and migration from rural areas. In other parts of the world, starting with Britain in the 19th century, movement to cities was accompanied by the growth of manufacturing industries, providing jobs and helping to supply modern infrastructure. In Africa, however, this economic transformation has not yet taken place. Along with its increasingly dry and unpredictable climates, the greatest strain on Africa’s future comes from the simple fact that there is not enough formal employment for its rapidly growing numbers of young, urban people.

As Robert Rotberg has written, sub-Saharan Africa is “experiencing the most rapid population increases anywhere, ever”, such that “half of all the babies born on the planet between now and 2050” will be delivered in the region. African women begin having babies, on average, in their early 20s, meaning that generations compound faster than elsewhere. Thanks to improved medicine, more of those infants, and mothers, now survive.

The population statistics are far from reliable, but those collected by the World Bank at least give a sense of scale. On average, women in sub-Saharan Africa have 4.3 children each. In some countries, including the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Somalia and Chad, they have more than six each. Whereas, in 1975, Africa had half as many people as Europe, by the middle of this century it will have three times more, and the median African will still be in their mid-20s. This growth will be concentrated in urban Africa. The continent has 15 of the world’s 20 fastest-growing cities, and in the coming decades many of its urban centers will double or triple in size.

Many African cities display what appear to be impressive feats of development. Returning to the Horn of Africa, the Ethiopian capital Addis Ababa is a case in point. Flush with Chinese and Emirati cash, Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed is razing much of the city’s historic core and replacing it with grand parks and museums, plazas, hotels and offices. The horizon blooms with skyscrapers and condominiums. Meanwhile, the Ethiopian state has for over two decades been seeking to foster an industrial revolution, directing investment towards factories, railways, housing, and an enormous hydroelectric plant in the form of the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam. For much of that time, economic growth has averaged an impressive 9% annually.

And yet, behind the glamorous projects and flattering statistics, prosperity remains scarce. Despite Ethiopia’s frighteningly low wages — Ethiopian textile workers earn half as much as those in Bangladesh — the country is struggling to follow East Asian countries along the manufacturing route to development. There is much more automation now, and complex supply chains allow firms to use African workers for discrete tasks, such as assembling components made elsewhere, which don’t add up to proper industries. This leaves few paths towards mass employment or higher-skilled, better-paying jobs.

The struggle to industrialize has grave consequences for political stability. Ethiopia has Africa’s second largest population (though estimates vary significantly), and drought-stricken rural areas are regularly on the verge of famine. Like many African countries, Ethiopia also has deep ethnic divisions, with the army struggling against violent uprisings in three different regions. Young men without hope of employment provide the recruiting pools for local militias, and for the bandit parties that kidnap travelers and employees of foreign businesses.

As for the shiny precincts of Addis Ababa, these cater to a relatively small middle class that works for the state or has managed to plug into the global service sector. Thousands of less fortunate residents have been forcibly evicted by Abiy’s schemes. Much of the property development in the city is highly speculative, and many projects are never finished. Urban development has been a source of conflict in the past. The previous government’s plans to expand Addis Ababa at the expense of farmers in the surrounding region were abandoned amid protests and violence.

Little wonder that so many Ethiopians, and Africans more generally, do not remain in the cities where they first arrive, but want to emigrate further afield. Thanks to modern media and communication, they know that people elsewhere have better lives and far higher wages, that there are routes for reaching those places, and that some emigrants actually make it. With Europe’s current asylum system, ambitious and determined young men especially have a good chance of being awarded work and residence rights, if they can just get there. But Europe is only the destination for a small percentage of Africa’s emigrants, most of whom move within the continent itself. For Ethiopians, another major migration route flows eastwards across the Red Sea, towards Saudi Arabia. It is a brutal journey along roads littered with decomposing corpses, and those who are not gunned down by Saudi border guards often face appalling exploitation within the Gulf kingdom itself. Millions of Ethiopians try their luck anyway.

Many of Africa’s swelling cities show similar patterns to Addis Ababa. Globalization has fractured these spaces, allowing small pockets to leap ahead and join the advanced industries of the 21st century, while leaving the rest with Chinese-made phones and consumer goods but few opportunities for training or employment. A large part of the continent’s wealth, such as it is, has come from primary resources like fossil fuels and metals, often extracted by foreign companies, creating small numbers of rich individuals rather than a large body of skilled wage earners. Well over half of urban residents in sub-Saharan Africa live in slums, lacking reliable access to clean water, sanitation, and other basic services. A still higher proportion earn their living in the informal economy, working as street vendors and casual laborers, smugglers and traders, their businesses and occupations unknown to the government.

Nowhere will the dramas of the African city play out on a larger scale than in Lagos, the Nigerian metropolis on the Atlantic coast. Nigeria is Africa’s most populous country by far, and that population is growing rapidly, due to overtake the United States by 2050. Lagos is destined to become one of the world’s largest urban centers. It may eventually merge with coastal cities in four other countries, together forming, as Howard French puts it, “the largest zone of continuous, dense habitation on earth, with something in the order of half a billion people”.

Nigeria has one of Africa’s leading economies, boasting the continent’s largest oil and gas reserves, as well as strengths in manufacturing, tech, finance and other services. Yet 90 million Nigerians are thought to live in extreme poverty. Likewise, Lagos is home to an impressive middle class of educated professionals and businesspeople, but the city cannot keep up with the sheer speed of its own growth. More than 1,000 new inhabitants arrive each day.

According to the Polish-Nigerian political scientist Remi Adekoya, the situation in cities like Lagos is worsened by the bad governance of Nigeria’s narrow political elite. There is, he told me, “huge frustration” and “a feeling of helplessness” among middle-class Nigerians, who are unable to leverage their resources to improve the country since they have “zero influence over the political system”.

One might think that a frustrated middle class combined with large numbers of underemployed young people would make Nigerian cities ripe for political unrest. But Adekoya says there are powerful factors working against such a possibility. One is simply repression. “They know that their governments are ruthless, and will not hesitate to send out soldiers on the streets to shoot at them,” he says. Another is religion, which plays an important role in the lives of most Africans, and can lead them to interpret inequality in terms of divine favor. Finally, there is the fear that political convulsions will lead to Nigeria — like Ethiopia and many other African nations composed of different groups ­­— “descending into ethnic-based civil war”.

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Instead, political disillusionment has encouraged what Adekoya calls “a form of escapism”, whereby middle-class people focus their energies on the private sphere. Many have opted for a more literal escape too. A large diaspora of talented Nigerians is making its mark overseas, in countries like Britain, where it has been notably successful in politics, business, the arts, and many other fields. Between 2017-2023, about 100,000 Nigerians departed to study in the UK. 75,000 nurses left Nigeria over the same period. Polls regularly report that 60-70% of young Nigerians are eager to relocate to other countries.

This is not just a problem for Nigeria, of course. Somewhere in the region of 70,000-100,000 trained professionals leave Africa each year. In Britain, we tend to discuss the morality of immigration rather myopically in terms of the value of openness, the merits of diversity and the benefits to our economy, rarely considering the cost to poorer countries of losing their most educated and ambitious young citizens. Yet there is surely a cost when a third of African scientists live outside the continent, when there are more Zimbabwean midwives in Britain than in Zimbabwe, and more Ethiopian physicians in Chicago than in Addis Ababa. The World Health Organization predicts that sub-Saharan Africa will face a deficit of 5.3 million health workers by 2050.

But as European governments struggle with rising anti-immigration sentiment, they are now most concerned with reducing the numbers that are coming to the continent illegally or to claim asylum. According to the current consensus, endorsed by Britain’s Labour government as well, this is best achieved by investing in Africa to address the conditions that spur migration, and to bribe African governments to act as an advance border control. In theory, this diplomatic approach can tie in with other European agendas in Africa, such as gaining access to natural resources, combating radical Islam and checking Chinese and Russian influence.

The British government last year pledged £84 million to address factors driving migration in North and East Africa, through a combination of skills programs and humanitarian aid. But the real champion of this African strategy is Italian prime minister Giorgia Meloni, who has consistently pushed something called the Mattei Plan for Africa. A series of meetings with African leaders has resulted in a scheme for €5.5 billion of investment in energy, education, health and agriculture across more than a dozen African countries. Italy wants help stemming migration in the Mediterranean, while looking to benefit from African oil and gas.

This summer, the Mattei Plan was officially folded into EU policy, as Meloni staged a joint summit with European commission president Ursula von der Leyen in Rome. They announced funding for a railway in the Lobito Corridor, an area rich in strategic minerals that links Zambia, the Democratic Republic of Congo and Angola. They also committed to debt relief and an undersea cable linking Europe with East Africa.

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But Europe’s stance is not quite as it appears. The key goals guiding the EU’s investment in Africa are “sustainable growth” and an “inclusive, green and digital” economic transformation. These are the same policy clichés preferred by most of the Western NGOs supporting development in the continent. The problem, as numerous African politicians and activists have pointed out, is that no other region has successfully developed its economy by green or sustainable means; they have all relied on the intensive use of fossil fuels to foster industrialization. There is as yet no proven path to development through renewables, let alone through digital technology, and the evidence in Africa is hardly promising so far. Almost half of Africans lack reliable electricity, while three quarters of those in rural areas have no internet access.

The grim truth is that European leaders and development agencies do not want Africa to turn into an even bigger China sitting just across the Mediterranean; a powerful industrialized region with over two billion people, placing enormous demands on the world’s resources and producing vast quantities of carbon emissions. Like infrastructure investments which facilitate the extraction of natural resources, contributions to “sustainable growth” in Africa are a cynical form of generosity. They really amount to paying Africans to remain poor.

And yet, Meloni was surely right when she said at the recent summit in Rome, “Africa is the continent where our future is most at stake.” The Mediterranean and even the Sahara are no longer clear civilizational borders; millions of people in Europe now have family ties with Africa. Short of dramatically different immigration policies, or breakthroughs in automation that reduce demand for foreign labor, it is difficult to see how these connections will not continue to grow. Asylum systems will need to change if European governments are to address popular anger over porous borders and immigration. But Africa will soon have a larger working age population than India or China, and there will be plenty of economic interests clamoring to use that workforce on our own aging continent.

For Africa itself, the greatest challenge remains that of providing its burgeoning numbers of young people with livelihoods to meet their needs and ambitions — something which can only be accomplished within the continent’s new urban worlds. If it fails this challenge, then the pressure valve of emigration will not be enough to prevent growing political instability, an outcome that is already manifest in many African countries. Cities will be the engines of Africa’s transformation, or the ultimate symbols of its tragedy.

This, after all, is a place that promises a new Austin, one, its marketers say, that offers “serenity in the sky”. There’ll be restaurants, and retail, and a hotel complete with swimming pool and spa. Far from a repeat of The War of the Worlds, then, the Waterline speaks to another H.G. Wells fantasy, one the writer envisaged as “a great gallery” where people could meet and live in harmony. Nor is it alone. There are 13 similar high-rises coming right across Austin, as its population rises and GDP soars.

This emerging urban Austin, a place of towers and cocktail bars, is fundamentally different from the established centers of the East and Midwest. In beehives like Wall Street or The Loop, office workers historically came in to work, then retreated back to the suburbs each night. Downtown Austin, though, puts residents at its hearts, focusing less on offices and more on lifestyles. Yet if that means amenities galore, this tidy vision risks redefining American cities for the worse — even as the old problems of urban dysfunction always loom.

For decades, the Texan capital was synonymous with a single word: weird. Unlike the conservative countryside, or else oil towns like Dallas, the self-proclaimed People’s Republic of Austin was a place of lively bars and soul-filled clubs. There was Rainey Street, too, a charming Latino neighborhood filled with pretty tree-lined cottages. When I first came here, almost half a century ago, I was reminded of nothing less than Haight-Ashbury — the San Francisco neighborhood so beloved among artists and hippies.

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Now, though, this older, shabbier Austin is slipping away. Quite aside from landmark developments like the Waterline, that’s clear enough in the numbers. Since 2000, downtown’s population has tripled to 15,000. In large part, in fact, Kevin Burns argues the ultra-modern vibe can be understood by sheer demand, with the rising forest of towers appealing to young professionals tired of life in the suburbs. “The driver is quality of life,” says the bearded 47-year-old real-estate developer, sipping a coffee as the sound of construction echoes around us.

It’s not hard to see what he means. Life by the Colorado, still feverishly in the making, is pleasantly walkable. There are yew-scattered parklands, and bike lanes and creeks. It’s all surely a step up from the convention centers and stadiums that once got urban developers excited. There’s also plenty to do: dozens of bars and restaurants open in Austin every month, dovetailed by yoga studios and comedy clubs. Yet if the new Austin promises paradise for wealthy hipsters, the hippies of yore seem far less welcome. Downtown, after all, is expensive, hardly surprising when so many of the new arrivals are tech workers, “empty nesters” with far fewer children to feed than their peers elsewhere. An apartment in the sky here will set you back $170,000 more than other parts of Central Texas, doubtless explaining why so many new downtowners are white.

All this speaks to a younger, hipper crowd, especially compared to the vast suburbs of somewhere like Houston. Nor is demography the only way downtown is different. As Hannah Rangel says, this is fundamentally a place to live, not work, with the vice president of Austin Downtown Allies explaining that offices are smaller than elsewhere. Once again, that’s probably a function of the city’s tech boom: with startups needing little more than coders and their Macbooks, they need far less floorspace than their corporate competitors.

Factor in the remote work revolution and it’s little wonder places like the Waterline are so popular, with residential and mixed-use construction easily outstripping office builds right across town. Nor, of course, is this unique to Austin: even America’s classic urban cores are going the same way. New York has its own planting of residential towers, while the Rust Belt undergoes a similar transition.

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Reviving the grand architecture of the dead industrial past, downtown Milwaukee is one good example here. Another is Detroit, with its gaggle of neoclassical skyscrapers. Then there’s the Renaissance Center, all Seventies steel, abandoning offices for flats and entertainment. And where houses are coming, business is going. According to one recent report, residential conversion projects were set to double through 2024, even as demand for new office space tumbles.

Given the apparent enthusiasm for remote work among finance and professional services — the sectors that long kept downtowns afloat — it’s tempting to assume that the new Austin will soon become the new America. In truth, though, Wells’s “brilliant and entertaining agglomeration” isn’t a sure thing. One way of thinking about this is by digging into the numbers. Yes, the population growth along the Colorado is impressive, but roughly 98% of newcomers to Austin still settle in suburbs and exurbs. And why not? With WFH allowing employees to make money anywhere, many still prefer a yard and a picket fence over an apartment in the sky.

For those companies insisting on in-person attendance, meanwhile, America’s hinterland remains appealing. Once more, the statistics are telling, with jobs and homes across the sunbelt increasingly shifting to shiny new suburbs, with plenty of space for office parks, and where the overbuilt apartments are cheap. As far as Austin is concerned, certainly, outlying areas north of the city are wildly popular. The Domain, which lies just outside the city, is thriving, offering a car-oriented vision of suburban life. Though there’s some dense development, the surrounding area is covered by single family homes. Compared to downtown, it’s easy to park, and has fewer street-level hassles. It’s a similar story across the country, whether in Irvine, California, or New Albany near Columbus.

And while the denizens downtown are richer than average, the urban analyst Bill Fulton warns that their “niche life” remains at odds with the average high earner — most of whom still reside outside the urban core. One good example is Brian Niccol, the new CEO of Starbucks, who runs the coffee giant not from downtown Seattle, but rather from the warm weather and easy lifestyle of coastal Southern California.

In a sense, this is unsurprising. The American job market began spreading its tentacles into the suburbs as early as the Fifties. Prodded along by the automobile, and perhaps too by the enduring power of the traditional American Dream, a recent MIT study found that 80% of America’s metropolitan population now live in car-friendly suburbs, while just 8% live downtown. Nor are all suburbs created equal: though the sprawl is as popular as ever, the brownstone streets of Brooklyn or Georgetown, designed with mass transit in mind, are home to just 13% of people.

Simply put, then, the old urban model is dissolving, though what comes next remains unclear. As that last statistic implies, one issue is transport. Especially since the pandemic, networks across the US are struggling, with many short of money and plagued by crime and squalor. In 2023, some still operate between a third and two thirds below their pre-Covid levels, while in Austin barely 5% of people downtown make use of buses or the city’s light rail system.

It’s just as well, then, that Burns pins his hopes not on trains but Uber, or else the increasingly ubiquitous Waymos, which cart people about in driverless vehicles. “The Ubers are here now,” Burns says, “but the Waymo’s are going to change cities, and make places more attractive and connected.” Austin, with its tech-oriented elites, seems an ideal place to become, in the words of former mayor Steve Adler, “the Kitty Hawk of driverless cars.”

Yet if getting around in Austin may soon become a private-sector affair, Big Tech can’t hope to do everything. Indeed, Burns’s biggest worry is the proliferation of criminals and vagrants stalking inner-city streets. Stroll between downtown and the Capitol and you’ll see drug addicts and alcoholics sprawled by the gutter, albeit in far fewer numbers than other big cities. And, to be fair, some of these residual challenges do seem to be subsiding, especially with a new mayor who takes street-level disorder more seriously. Even so, Burns remains skeptical of Jose Garza, Austin’s radical DA, complaining that he “does not enforce the law” amid rising chaos on the streets. Given the grim decline of towns like Oakland and Chicago, these fears feel justified.

A more intractable problem with the new Austin — typified by the Waterline tagline that “work is rooted in wellness” — is that it has a limited market. Much of the original appeal of downtown’s earlier iteration was its funkiness, its scruffiness, when its dives and honky tonks were spots where anything, it felt, could happen. Good luck recreating that at Whole Goods. The offbeat charm of Rainey Street has vanished too, with just two of its bungalows remaining and its Latino residents priced out.

We probably shouldn’t mourn these shifts too much. Cities, after all, are always changing. Yet walk the streets of downtown Austin and this historic neighborhood, once so full of life, feels as sterile as Singapore. In that, it shares the fate of Spitalfields, or Hudson Yards, once the “great galleries” of Wellsian imagination, but now little more than vast amenity districts for a small and well-heeled elite. Better than dystopia — but hardly transformative for the mass of urban residents.

Walls have been going up again in Oxford over the past few years. But this time, they aren’t made of brick. The barriers consist of wooden planters festooned with daffodils or removable bollards. They might seem innocuous compared with brick walls. And their purpose, too, seems so benign. These road blocks are intended to create Low Traffic Neighbourhoods, or LTNs, which, according to the established propaganda, are officially good for us: they cut traffic speeds, carbon emissions and noise pollution. They are supposed to encourage children to ditch their PS5s and play outside. In particular, they are designed to make us drive less. And they are not confined to Oxford; they’re springing up across the country.

Unlike the Cutteslowe Walls, these fenced-off micro communities retain one point of entry and exit for drivers — every address within an LTN remains accessible — but the routes are purposefully more circuitous, sometimes tortuously so, to encourage a “think twice” approach to hopping in the car when it would be quicker to walk or cycle. The ideal LTN is a compact square-kilometre in size, meaning the average able-bodied resident should be able to walk from one side to the other in under 15 minutes. They are a nice idea — but one that lately has hit the cold, hard bollard of reality.

Blocking roads to reduce traffic is not a new idea. But using roadblocks to reconfigure swathes of existing cities is a relatively recent innovation. The poster boy of this cyclo-urbanism is the Danish architect Jan Gehl, who, over the past 40 years, has successfully managed to entirely remove cars from parts of Copenhagen. Aspects of his plan have been cribbed by UK cycling activists with a knowledge of civic planning, and placed into campaigning proposals for corners of cities that they particularly value, such as the streets they lived on.

When Covid-19 prompted a mass avoidance of public transport and a sense of crisis about the future of the city, LTNs were offered up by activists to councillors as both an opportunity to turn Britain into a nation of cyclists, and to prevent mass gridlock as we took to our cars. Since March 2020, an area the size of Tyneside has effectively banned motorists without much oversight by professional urban planners.

And yet LTNs seem to remain popular. A recent poll by Redfield & Wilton Strategies found that 58% of Londoners supported the introduction of LTNs, with only 17% opposed. Of course there will be a vocal minority unhappy at the disruption, angered by the increase of traffic on congested arterial routes or the closure of their favourite rat run. These are presumably the same people who made off with the bollards in Oxford soon after they were first installed — or knocked them down, set them alight or took chainsaws to them. In February, almost three years after Oxford’s first trial LTN, some 2,000 protesters were still sufficiently disgruntled to attend a rally in the city centre that ended with violent clashes and five arrests.

There is a sense that politicians are increasingly waging a “war on cars”. Measures include road filtering, to give priority to low-carbon methods of transport, and placing extra charges on polluting vehicles, in a push towards net zero. The shift is prompting anguished debate and splits within parties. Earlier this month, Labour lost one of its safest council seats in the country to a former party member-turned-independent who stood opposed to the imposition of LTNs across Newham, in East London. Last autumn, former Labour politician Lutfur Rahman was returned as mayor of Tower Hamlets, also in East London, deposing the party’s chosen incumbent, on a pro-motorist platform; one of his first acts was to axe a newly installed LTN and demand a review of the others across his borough. More recently, the prospective Labour MP for Uxbridge has been openly campaigning against Sadiq Khan’s Ulez scheme.

In Oxford City, large swathes of Labour’s local party have defected to an independent group fighting the LTNs and the traffic schemes that will supersede them; in March, its official candidate in the Littlemore ward came within an inch of being beaten by such an independent.

The truth is that the bollards in Oxford’s Low Traffic Neighbourhoods have upset more locals than the Cutteslowe Walls ever did. Even the Liberal Democrats, part of the rainbow coalition of progressive parties which run the Oxford’s council, are rejecting the idea they once championed. Andrew Gant, Lib Dem cabinet member for highway management, was keen to make it clear to me that the LTNs weren’t his idea. Describing Oxford’s wider traffic management system, he insists: “The LTNs are not one of the core schemes.” Three years after traffic filtering was trialled, the bollards and planters are to be replaced by other forms of traffic calming, such as bus gates monitored by traffic cameras and a workplace car parking levy.

The Conservative Party, more than any other, is seeking to distance itself from the LTN experiment. Last week, transport secretary Mark Harper demanded that councils across the country rethink “unpopular” LTNs. But they need to backpedal harder if they don’t want to be associated with the policy. In Oxfordshire, it was a Tory-led council that green-lit local LTNs. It was Boris Johnson who, as prime minister during the first lockdown in 2020, set up a £225 million Emergency Active Travel Fund (EATF) to promote new transport routes for walking and cycling.

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In and of itself, EATF would have been relatively innocuous, were it not for the fact that David Cameron’s government had already granted new powers to local authorities under the 2015 Infrastructure Act. The worst kind of Coalition compromise, it sloughed off oversight for road maintenance to local authorities in an attempt to “get things done”, and encouraged experimental traffic orders that implemented new road schemes without public consultation. As if emerging from a stupor, Rishi Sunak’s administration has now removed funding for LTNs, while in Oxford, the party is now campaigning against the very thing it introduced.

The supposedly progressive idea of roping-off residential streets for the all-round benefit of local residents doesn’t work. If you want to know why LTNs have gone from being a panacea for the UK’s urban traffic problems to being sidelined three years later, look no further than Oxford. Here, LTNs were bad politics from the beginning, a case of localism run riot, and what happens when you give the cleverest people in the room carte blanche to bulldoze through a single solution to a single policy. In lockdown, the Conservative-run county council, followed by the Lib-Lab-Green coalition that later replaced it, gave unprecedented priority to activist groups with a narrow agenda regarding transport policy. These groups included Oxfordshire Liveable Streets, whose campaign manager once glued her chest to a busy road in the name of Extinction Rebellion.

In addition, no matter how nice they may be once you’re inside, LTNs weren’t really planned at all. This pioneering piece of urbanism was mainly a series of poorly conceived roadblocks determined by the suggestions of cycling activists on Zoom meetings. Little professional understanding of traffic flows were ever applied. Indeed, possible traffic jams were considered a plus as they would provide further disincentives to car travel.

Given that LTNs were conceived to operate at a street level, it is not surprising that they have gone so badly wrong at a wider urban scale. The arterial road system in Oxford, particularly the ring road, is not up to dealing with the amount of new traffic that has been forced into it by the roadblocks; traffic times have lengthened hugely. Anti-car advocates insist that such measures work in cities like Utrecht in the Netherlands or Ghent in Belgium, conveniently ignoring the fact that both places also have three-lane ring roads and three tram lines. If we are to have Ghent-style LTNs, let’s have the rest of Ghent’s infrastructure, too.

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At a political level, there is some irony in the fact that europhile supporters of LTNs have not heeded the lesson of the gilets jaunes protests in France — namely, that blue-collar workers will not be made sacrificial lambs to environmental policies. Idrees Mohammed, managing director of Oxford Lettings, a property management agency, told me that electricians now charge 60% more for a call-out into the Cowley LTN because it takes so long to get to it. Amir Steve Ali, who works in a takeaway in East Oxford, recently delivered a petition against LTNs to Downing Street with more than 30,000 signatures. “You’re trying to keep some of the roads clean-air, pollution-free — but you’ve just chucked your rubbish next door, where others are now facing gridlock,” he says. “Where’s the justice in this?”

The LTNs were primarily designed to inhibit one form of transport use, rather than, say, make improvements to cycling provision. For a university city once synonymous with the bike, Oxford has pretty poor cycle lanes out to the suburbs, incapable of handling any increased demand.

There is something more fundamental at play than the local situation in Oxford, however. In recent years, there has been a slow retreat from shared urban experiences. Lockdown delivered a shattering blow to the idea of the city as a shared space. LTNs were supposed to encourage “15-minute cities”, where everything you need, from school to supermarket to GP surgery, is just a 15-minute walk from your front door. This concept was not an attempt to “lock” people into their homes, as some of the wilder claims would have it. But LTNs did emerge from the same failure to preserve our collective ownership of streets, which includes the rights to traverse them in the predominant transport system of the age, the car.

Could LTNs have been introduced in a way that would have benefitted Oxford as a whole, rather than just the advocates who live within them? Or is chopping a city up into neat but almost impenetrable quads, in a bid to please academically minded activists, always a bad idea? How different is it, fundamentally, from building walls to keep people out? Those waging war on the car must endeavour to answer these questions, or else risk throttling the very places they cherish.

This is a mistake. Demography may be destiny, but it is geography that determines its political shape. The greatest division today is to do with place: in particular, three basic terroirs — urban, suburban and rural — which reflect a divergence in economic interest, family structure and basic values, particularly between big city economies and those on the periphery.

This fracture is widening at a time when the demographic balance between these regions is shifting. For much of the past two centuries, the overwhelming inclination was towards urbanisation, with dense cores serving as the prime engines of economic, cultural and social change. Today, however, that pattern is shifting, particularly since the pandemic, which saw two million citizens move out of big US cities. Even in urban-oriented Europe, 63% of cities experienced a population decline during the pandemic.

Does this mean “the era of urban supremacy is over”, as the New York Times put it? Quite possibly. But don’t expect the urban leadership to acknowledge it. Even as they desperately attempt (and largely fail) to lure workers back downtown, urban political interests continue to dominate the national conversation — even amid high levels of crime, street-level disorder and the resulting shuttering of businesses.

Largely ignored by the city-dominated media, the world’s urban core has been losing this battle for generations. This is not only evident in the United States, but also across Europe and Australia. According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics, little more than 5% of growth from 1966 to 2021 was in the core cities. In Europe, barely 37% of people live in cities, with the rest in fast-growing suburbs, small towns and rural areas.

Of course, many cities have experienced some revival over the past decade, but that “boom” has largely benefited educated newcomers and their wealthy employers. Urban regions became both richer and poorer; according to Pew research, the greatest inequality in America now exists in “superstar cities”, such as San Francisco, New York, Los Angeles and San Jose.

These shifts have, unsurprisingly, shaped urban politics. As middle-class families have left, the urban terroir has been gutted of the old urban bulwark of solid middle and working-class families; as Fred Siegel has observed, it is dominated by an “upstairs/downstairs” coalition of the affluent and dependent.

This demographic reality has driven a shift towards a more progressive politics. In 1984, for example, Ronald Reagan won 31% of the vote in San Francisco and 27.4% in Manhattan. In 2016, Donald Trump won only 10% of the vote in each. Between 1998 and 2018, urban counties — which sometimes includes suburbs — went from 55% to 62% Democratic. Today, there is not a single Republican Mayor of a city of more than one million people. Recent victories of progressives in Los Angeles, Oakland, Chicago, New York and Minneapolis, despite widespread social disorder and economic decline, suggest this pattern may well be inexorable.

The antipode to the urban terroir lies in the countryside and rural hinterlands, which are experiencing a modest revival across the Western world. Yet even as they begin to regain appeal, rural areas are struggling against the dominant urban drive to “net zero”, which threatens economies based on local fossil fuel development, farming and manufacturing. For instance, it was high energy prices brought on by climate policies that sparked the Gilets Jaunes movement in France’s small towns, villages and exurban communities. To meet climate demands and limit their use of chemical fertilisers, Dutch farmers, among the world’s most efficient and ecology minded, have similarly risen up and joined their Spanish, Polish and Italian counterparts.

Even worse, the urban elites propose reaching their net zero fantasies by physically disfiguring rural communities. This offensive is being pushed by oligarchs such as J.P. Morgan’s Jamie Dimon, who resents peasants blocking land acquisition for subsidy-driven “green” investments and seeks federal help to secure these lands. But he is just one man of a wider movement, in which rural areas, home to the vast majority of proposed new solar and wind projects, are now asked to fulfil the green dreams of Manhattan, San Francisco and west Los Angeles. In California, the Nature Conservancy estimates that fulfilling the state’s net zero targets would require up to one-tenth of the farming acreage in the coming decades.

People living in the areas have responded as one might expect: between 2015 and 2022, community rejections of such projects in the US grew from 50 to over 500. A similar narrative is playing out throughout the EU and among farmers Australia, who fear transmission lines and windmills will not only make their farms less productive, but destroy the surrounding landscape.

For now, the political revival in small towns and rural areas represents an enormous boost to the Right. The once-strong progressive populism of rural communities has evaporated as more residents now feel more threatened by urban interests than corporate power. As a 2020 study from the Bennett Institute at the University of Cambridge found, there is a “deepening geographical fracture” in European societies reminiscent of “the stark urban-rural political divides of the early 20th century”.

This can be seen most clearly in the United States. In 2008, Barack Obama won nearly one quarter of the country’s non-metro counties. Eight years later, Hillary Clinton won barely 10%. In the past, notes Ernie Goss, professor of economics at Creighton University, the rural states regularly elected Democrats. How will Biden fare? “He couldn’t get a cup of coffee in this part of the country,” he told me. “To say he’s unpopular is an understatement.”

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Caught between these two increasingly extreme polities lies the third terroir, “the middle landscape” of suburban and exurban areas. Although these areas constitute an absolute majority of Americans and two-thirds of Europe’s 99 largest metros, they have little political power. This largely reflects the fact that suburbs tend to be populated by middle and working-class households, often too preoccupied with making a living and raising a family to indulge in political theatre. In other words, the middle landscape has the numbers, but has not found its voice.

Yet ultimately, it is the suburbs that will determine America’s future. They remain, unlike the other terroirs, contestable, home to at least 40% of all US House seats. For almost 20 years, the Republican-leaning suburban voters held steady at around 47%, with Democratic leaders at 45%. In 2016, the suburbs voted 50 to 45 for Trump, but two years later the suburban electorate tilted blue, effectively handing the House back to the Democrats. Then, in 2022, the predicted GOP landslide never developed, in large part because suburbanites split their ballots.

Whether this will be repeated remains unclear. On the one hand, Biden’s embrace of policies that seek to force communities to densify and take in low-income residents are not likely to be widely popular among suburbanites, who, after all, moved there to escape the city. On the other, the suburb’s changing demography could work to the favour of Democrats, as culturally liberal millennials and ethnic minorities join the city exodus.

But none of this represents the politics of choice — a programme suited to the needs and aspirations of this middle terroir. Right now, politics is inflicted on these communities rather than being shaped around them. Until they gain a voice, the West’s geographical cleavage will continue to widen, producing endless conflicts that fail the majority caught in between.

London, New York, San Francisco, Chicago, Los Angeles — these urban centres epitomised what Jean Gottman described in 1983 as “transactional cities”. Based on finance, high-end business and IT services, they were defined not by production and trade in physical goods, but by intangible products concocted in soaring office towers. For years, academic researchers, both on the Left and Right, envisioned a high-tech economic future dominated by dense urban areas. As The New York Times‘s Neil Irwin observed in 2018: “We’re living in a world where a small number of superstar companies choose to locate in a handful of superstar cities where they have the best chance of recruiting superstar employees.”

Yet even before the current downturn, the data defied the bravado. For decades, the ultra-tall towers that once symbolised urban greatness have been as anachronistic as the cathedrals of the Middle Ages. Office occupancy has been declining since the turn of the century, along with the construction of new space. In 2019, before the pandemic, construction was one-third the rate of 1985 and half that of 2000.

More serious still has been the movement of people. Migration to dense cities started to decline in 2015, when large metropolitan areas began to see an exodus to smaller locales. By 2022, rural areas were also gaining population at the expense of cities. The pandemic clearly accelerated this process, with a devastating rise in crime and lawlessness: notably in London, Paris, Washington, New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Philadelphia and Chicago. In some parts of Chicago and Philadelphia, young men now have a greater chance of being killed by firearms than an American soldier serving during the Afghanistan or Iraq wars.

The fading allure of the big city — further undermined by the post-pandemic shift to remote work in many sectors — is also taking place against the backdrop of an urban economy that has increasingly rewarded the few. Of course, some districts, such as the north side of Chicago, have experienced impressive growth, but they are often surrounded by others suffering from severe deterioration. And for all of gentrification’s wonders, almost a fifth of residents in the 50 largest US cities live below the poverty line.

Contrast this with the historic role of cities as engines of upward mobility. Even the addition last year of a few thousand migrants forced New York Mayor Eric Adams to declare a state of emergency; in other words, New York, a city largely built on the labour of newcomers, now seems too weak to house and employ a substantial number of immigrants. Amid this failure, perhaps it’s unsurprising that migrants and minorities are heading to America’s suburbs, sprawled sunbelt cities and smaller towns.

So what is the urban future? The answer lies less in the central business districts than the suburbs and exurbs. And this presents a nightmare for the traditional urbanist. In contrast to central business districts, suburban offices have fared far better while sprawled areas such as Tampa, Fort Lauderdale, Austin and Nashville have become the nation’s hottest office markets. With the large majority of major metropolitan area residents already outside the urban cores, the most enticing economic opportunities may lie in modern-day versions of Ebenezer Howard’s “garden cities”, such as Cinco Ranch outside Houston or New Albany near Columbus .

These peripheral developments have long disgusted planners and environmentalists; Al Gore, for instance, has been waging a dogged war on “sprawl” since before the end of the last century. But in reality, they are not the carbon-crazed dystopias depicted by many urbanists. Far from being bedroom communities for commuters travelling to the city core, they are increasingly places with their own thriving town centres and cultural venues. By lending themselves to remote work and shorter commutes, they also prove ideal for energy efficiency and emissions reductions.

Despite their centuries-long dominance, traditional cities cannot compete with these areas. And if they are to have a decent future, they must move beyond their grandiosity and shift their focus to their greatest resource: strong neighbourhoods and the creative people who inhabit them. Downtowns may be fading everywhere, but neighbourhoods in places such Boston and even much of San Francisco have retained their streetwise vitality.

In New York, city leaders also realise that the era shaped by the office tower is coming to an end, and plan to convert many of them into housing. But this may be of only limited utility; according to one recent estimate, barely 20 million of the city’s 420 million square feet of office space is suitable for conversion, despite the wishes of the buildings’ desperate owners. At the same time, some are still pushing new large-scale office projects, even as big developers, such as Related and Vornado, pull out of massive developments and vacancy rates remain persistently high. In another less promising sign, both New York and Chicago plan to build large casinos — the kind of Hail Mary pass that has rarely delivered solid economic results.

But changing building patterns will not be enough. A successful neighbourhood strategy, based on real improvements for residents, also requires shifting away from the progressive agenda that has made so many cities unliveable: from bans on energy sources such natural gas and a refusal to crack down on crime to the usually miserable state of urban public education. Communities may still live in city neighbourhoods, but they need to have a reason to want to keep living there, particularly if they have children.

In the likely event that this proves too long-term a strategy, even under progressive rule, some cities — notably New York and London — could witness a resurgence shakily built on tourism. Even as residents flee or are priced out, they will continue to attract students, the childless young and, at least for now, the ultra-rich leisure class. But this is not a serious programme for recovering urban supremacy. These areas will become, a H.G. Wells predicted over a century ago, “places of concourse and rendezvous”, home largely to elites, their servants and the childless.

This may keep some cities from total decline, but they will play a very different role to that once celebrated by Jane Jacobs, the Godmother of Urban Studies, and other urban romantics. So while urban areas may resurge, they will no longer be the unmatched centres of population, economic power and innovation. The game has changed and cities, to survive, must learn to adjust. For if they don’t, the fate of Ancient Rome awaits.

Brutalism had a brief heyday in the decades after the Second World War, an era of cultural optimism, new ideas and technological advance. But it has never exactly been popular, despite the best efforts of a small band of devotees. One such devotee is Barnabas Calder, an architecture academic and writer. In his passionate and well-written book Raw Concrete: The Beauty of Brutalism, he makes a strong and learned case for the style, focusing on its vigour and monumentality.

The book is a refreshing read. It was also a challenging one, given my own convictions about architecture, which are rather more on the Roger Scruton-reading, tweed-adjacent end of the scale. It certainly made me rethink some of my former prejudices towards the style.

For one thing, we cannot level against Calder the charge often faced by modernist architects, that they expect other people to live in their unprepossessing creations while they themselves retreat to classically proportioned Georgian townhouses or the gothic splendour of Victorian villas. When selecting a Cambridge college for his doctoral work, Calder chose Christ’s, on the basis of its famous Brutalist accommodation block, called New Court, and caused considerable bafflement to an admissions officer by specifically asking to live in it. He even spent a night in the “Hermit’s Castle”, a mysterious but fascinating bunker-like structure near Achmelvich in the remote north-west of Scotland, built in the Fifties for now-obscure reasons by a largely forgotten architect, David Scott.

Raw Concrete is akin to Richard Taylor’s classic How To Read A Church, in that it teaches the reader to begin to appreciate something that may at first feel incomprehensible and alien. Calder does an excellent job of putting Brutalism in its historical context, noting how the unprecedented abundance of cheap energy in the years after the Second World War meant that public projects could become much more structurally ambitious. He draws parallels with the huge reforming impulses that had been unleashed in post-war Britain, which involved reconstruction of the physical fabric of the big cities, the growth of the welfare state, the expansion of the middle-class, and the new universities.

It is easy for conservative-minded people to forget all this. The temptation is to look back on mid-20th century Britain through the distorting prisms of the economic disruption of the Seventies and the failure of the post-Sixties social settlement. However, life must be lived forwards, even if it can only be understood backwards. It is an injustice to the early Brutalists to associate them too directly with the things that went wrong in the years to come.

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Calder gently pushes back against other anti-Brutalist arguments, principally the suggestion that it was an excuse for fast, cheap and shoddy construction. This was undoubtedly the case in certain places, but he demonstrates quite conclusively that many of the most striking and prestigious projects were expensive and time-consuming. The Barbican took 20 years to complete. The New Court at Christ’s, Cambridge, by no means enormous, took four years, with a long lead-in of planning and development.

Brutalism, he makes clear, was in some ways a reaction against the early modernists, particularly what is now known as the International Style — think white square boxes, with large expanses of unadorned flat wall and large windows, and a certain sense of fragility and lightness, often heightened by the use of thin support pillars. These early modernist buildings, like the American Farnsworth House or the incomplete estate at Frinton-on-Sea in Essex, tended to be relatively modest, lacking the audacity that came to mark Brutalist construction.

It is the ambition and scale of Brutalism that really seems to inspire Calder, just as it has inspired members of Brutiful Birmingham. He writes movingly about his years teaching in Strathclyde University’s architecture school, and his first time seeing London’s Trellick and Balfron towers “in the flesh”. Even for a sceptic, it is hard not to get carried away by his delight, although I cannot take as much joy as he does in the limited and functional ornamentation of stairwells and roofs. The drama and uniqueness of buildings like the National Theatre is hard to gainsay, even for the doubter. I am also a fan of Dunelm House, the now-listed Brutalist HQ of the Durham University student union, which narrowly escaped demolition last year. It is a fine example of a medium-sized modernist building that looks good in a comparatively spacious setting, where it doesn’t intimidate or overwhelm its neighbours, nor ruin the harmony of a street.

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This was not the case for every Brutalist scheme. Some of the best-known were, or are, too gargantuan, and embodied a kind of monumental disdain for the city around them. The Tricorn Centre in Portsmouth and Gateshead’s Trinity Centre, both praised by Calder and both now demolished, were in this category, as is the Cumbernauld Centre in the Scottish new town of the same name. Of course, defenders of Brutalism might counter that the replacements for both Tricorn and Trinity are mere bland boxes with no vision or ideals behind them, anonymous additions to the steel and glass canyons that dominate early 21st century commercial architecture. At least Brutalism was about something!

It’s a reasonable point. Plausibly, the growing popular disillusionment with Brutalism since its heyday is not always the result of a specific dislike of the style, but of a more generalised fatigue with the uninspiring and tedious buildings that have become so prevalent in British towns and cities. It is also unfortunate that the high point of Brutalism coincided with the start of many disastrous trends in town planning, and the rise of car dependency which we are still struggling to manage today.

This doesn’t get Brutalism off the hook entirely. It’s hard to escape from the fact that concrete tends to age poorly, and as a material is generally ill-suited to a country that is often overcast and gloomy. (Calder, to his credit, uses very ordinary photos of his cherished masterworks, not the deceptive kind taken on cloudless sunny days that you find in coffee-table books.) Grandiose concrete construction is often highly inappropriate for British townscapes, which have gained much of their charm and attractiveness from harmonious and organic interrelations between neighbouring shops, houses and offices. Calder’s much-loved New Court was a sharp break with the rest of Cambridge’s King Street, presenting a stark and imposing bare façade. There are people who find such dramatic statements thrilling or even sublime, and I can see why, but to many others it is unsettling and unwelcome.

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Architecture is unlike the other arts, in the sense that it is inescapable. I don’t like Jackson Pollock paintings or Marvel films or overwrought high Victorian poetry, but they are very easy to avoid. The built environment is not like that. It belongs to all of us, because all of us have to make our lives within it. The aesthetic preferences of the ordinary and unsophisticated may be frustrating to the more educated and advanced, but when it comes to their homes and their workplaces and their communities, it is unjust to ignore them.

So I am not a convert — not exactly. For one thing, just as Calder insists that we must disentangle aesthetic judgments about Brutalist buildings from the social and political problems with which they have become synonymous, we can be grateful for the achievements of post-war governments — in sanitation, living standards, and a more equal society — without accepting that Brutalism was inseparable from, or intrinsic to, those achievements.

Maybe I am simply too conservative to truly love austere innovations in architecture that represent such a radical rupture with the past. Calder notes that some Brutalists, like Denys Lasdun who designed New Court and the National Theatre, were influenced by classicists such as Nicholas Hawksmoor, and he draws some lines of continuity between pre-modernist and modernist styles. This may well be true, but it’s hard for the non-specialist to see such continuities, and one should not have to be a specialist in order to feel at home in an urban setting.

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There is much to think about in some of the key tenets of architectural modernism. Most intriguing, perhaps, is the emphasis on “honesty”: the belief that buildings should as far as possible reflect the technologies and spirit of their own times, that they should not hide the materials or techniques used in their creation, and that they should reflect a democratic and liberating spirit. This is why they are so little adorned, and why they often seem stark and confrontational, and why they are so different from what came before. Basil Spence’s new Coventry Cathedral, completed in 1962, is a good example of a mostly successful attempt to come up with an appropriate idiom for Christian churches in a fractured and uncertain modern world where older forms feel exhausted or inadequate.

All the same, there are traps lurking in the background. Several times in Raw Concrete, Calder contrasts one of his favourite Brutalist landmarks with the ordinary, comfortable suburbia in which he, like so many of us, grew up. The impulse behind the comparison — the need to break from home and form our own tastes, to experience the grandeur and variety of the world — is perfectly natural and normal. The moment in the book where Calder describes fulfilling a long-held ambition, by visiting the top of one of the Barbican towers and peering down a dizzying triangular staircase, was spine-tingling.

But there is a danger in taking this instinct too far, and making the rejection of the traditional and the mundane a cornerstone of our thinking. Man does not live by magnificent concrete set pieces alone.

What is not asked, however, is why? Why did Britain, and much of the West, suddenly insist on remaking the built environment at such speed? The idea this resulted from a sudden bout of cultural self-loathing is supported by no evidence. The same is true for the notion that despite founding Nato and trying to maintain its empire, post-war Britain was somehow stuffed with surreptitious Marxists, from the commanding heights of Westminster to the planning offices of your local town hall.

Like most simple, comforting stories, this is wrong — a convenient narrative for inaction and self-satisfied moaning. What is needed instead is a Marxist, materialist account of why the built environment changed as it did. History, after all, is not forged purely by ideas.

What does a materialist analysis tell us? Firstly, that conservative concepts of beauty are incongruent with a devotion to the free market, something which Marx identified 150 years ago. Capitalism, driven by a relentless quest for profit, requires constant spatial transformation. This means we have the buildings we do because, for the most part, somebody somewhere is making a buck. This is difficult to grasp for many on the Right because they have elevated profit into a kind of ethical value (although this wasn’t always the case). But it should be relatively obvious, and far less outlandish than the idea that your nearest Wilko or TK Maxx looks the way it does because of the malevolent influence of Oscar Niemeyer. As Marx wrote in The Communist Manifesto: “All that is solid melts into air; all that is holy is profaned.” This is why a commitment to the free market, and to social and aesthetic conservatism, are irreconcilable.

This is most conspicuous today with Purpose Built Student Accommodation (PBSAs), those modular ziggurats afflicting skylines across Britain, from Altus House in Leeds to Beckley Point in Plymouth (each is the tallest building in their respective city). In Cardiff, more than 7,000 student “flats” were built in just three years.

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These buildings are springing up like medieval Bolognese towers for two reasons: firstly, because the building standards are lower for student developments than either residential housing or housing in multiple occupation; and secondly, because building them is lucrative. Forget Marxist council officers and architects with fantasies of becoming the next Frank Gehry. These buildings are being assembled in the quest for profit.

In Portsmouth, the city centre has now essentially become a student campus, the city’s sense of civic pride sacrificed to corporate student accommodation and fast-food outlets zipping deliveries to them via smartphone. It’s a grim vision of what our smaller city centres are becoming, with spaces for interaction in short supply. In Bournemouth, where I grew up, a seaside town synonymous with Victorian and Art Deco architecture looks increasingly like the set of the Teletubbies. Any sense of place is out of the question, the objective instead being to turn the town into a giant airport terminal.

Another important reason for those tragic “before and after” pictures so beloved of Trad Architecture Twitter is the popular adoption of the car in the mid-20th century. As with the failure to grasp the contradiction between free markets and conservation, this too is lost for many on the Right (although, in his defence, Scruton once referred to cars as “dangerous weapons”). This shouldn’t be overly surprising given the automobile was synonymous with personal freedom, an avatar of the sovereign individual conquering the elements. What is forgotten with this blanket projection of personal autonomy, detached from society, is that the dense patchwork of urban settlement that preceded it was lost. You may be able to go anywhere in a car, but you do so by cutting yourself off from others. In the words of Kafka: “you are free, and that is why you are lost.”

The reconfiguration of streets around the car is the principal reason cities such as Birmingham, Glasgow and Bristol lost much of their lustre. This was not limited to Britain, of course. Take the story of Robert Moses, the subject of Robert Caro’s magnificent biography The Power Broker. Over several decades as a public official in New York, Moses gleefully destroyed downtown areas often marked by cultural and racial diversity, as well as high density construction. The reason? To build expressways.

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By Daniel Kalder

The Cross Bronx Expressway offers the best example of this, ripping as it did through the heart of what would become the northern and southern parts of the Bronx. Things could have been worse, however. And it was only because of civic resistance, led by the likes of Jane Jacobs, that the construction of the proposed Lower Manhattan Expressway was stopped. Had she failed, it would have destroyed much of what is SoHo, Little Italy and Chinatown.

While it’s true that an infatuation with the car was central to post-war planning, today it is the Left leading the movement for low traffic neighbourhoods (LTNs). By contrast, it is Conservative councils, such as in Southampton or Wandsworth, that are reversing them. This is not to say all LTNs have been executed well, but it is clear that reducing our dependence on cars has become a part of the culture wars, with conservatives often on the wrong side. It’s one thing posting nostalgic pictures of yesteryear; it’s another to do the hard political yards to reverse mistaken choices since.

This bizarre confusion is most obvious in Poundbury, the experimental community built on land belonging to Prince Charles. Even here, in a place whose premise is a return to tradition, the civic centre of Queen Mother Square is a car park. Even if you embrace the orthodoxies behind the project (I personally find it more akin to a Las Vegas theme park), it’s hard to see how rows of hatchbacks and people carriers continue the legacy of Victorian or Georgian architecture. It’s the same in the village of Wickham, home to the second largest medieval square in England. The Visit Hampshire website refers to the village’s “15th century cottages” and “beautifully preserved Georgian houses”. Yet such wonders are also now obscured by the fact that the village square is now a rather large car park.

When it comes to the built environment, it’s easy to lapse into mistaken binaries. On the Right, conservatives wish to retain a distinctive architecture. They claim to want to “conserve” buildings whose qualities transcend present, fleeting sensibilities. They believe in objective standards of beauty — be they from antiquity, or the work of Palladio or Wren. The Left, meanwhile, is apparently driven by a fixation with the future, a permanent experimentation with forms and an impulse to discard the old.

And yet much of this narrative doesn’t align with reality. Councils of all stripes are gleefully granting permission for hideous student blocks, while a Conservative government oversees our rivers being pumped with effluent. Meanwhile, it is progressives who make the arguments for more humane environments where we use our cars less and enjoy a slower pace of life. They don’t always get everything right, but there should be no doubt that active travel, living streets and low traffic neighbourhoods are the simplest ways to begin making our towns and cities beautiful again.

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Why architecture is political

By Aris Roussinos

All of which is why the socialist case for respecting architectural heritage should not be at odds with a small ‘c’ conservative approach. This should be the opposite of the promethean road-building projects of the last century, while also avoiding a swivel-eyed hatred of more recent architectural heritage, whether that be the Barbican in London or Berlin’s Palace of the Republic. Take the brutalist Trinity car park in Gateshead. Conservative critics may think such buildings shouldn’t exist by default, and so it was demolished in 2010. Yet it has been replaced by a Tesco — hardly a win for Scrutonian beauty and the public good.

Finally, socialists and conservatives alike must understand that the built environment, as with every human endeavour, is an inheritance from one generation to the next. We should be humble rather than dismiss the ideas of those before us, regardless of which century they come from, while also asking what kinds of structures will fill our descendants with wonder. As Stephen Nachmanovitch wrote: “If we operate with a belief in long sweeps of time, we build cathedrals. If we operate from fiscal quarter to fiscal quarter, we build ugly shopping malls.” The enemy of beauty isn’t “modernism”; it’s a society built on maximising profit and shareholder value.

Today’s urban promise is, however, vastly different — not only in New York, but San Francisco and Los Angeles, London and Paris. No longer cities of aspiration, they are increasingly defined by an almost feudal hierarchy: the rich live well, protected by private security and served by local coffee shops and trendy clubs.

Meanwhile, the working class struggles to pay rent, possesses no demonstrable path to a better life and, as a result, often migrates elsewhere. Crime rates are spiking and homelessness, once an exception, is increasingly widespread. Those very streets once said to be “paved with gold” are now are filled with discarded needles, excrement and graffiti.

Indeed, what we are now witnessing is the decline of former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s description of the city as “a luxury product”. Today, that sense of “luxury” has all but vanished, with modern urban economies promoting class divisions rather than upward mobility. Amid all the hoopla about urban revival, the truth is that entrenched urban poverty in the US — places where 30% or more of the population live below the poverty line — actually grew in the first decade of the new millennium, from 1,100 to 3,100 neighbourhoods.

Even the New York Times admits that, in the past decade, cities have gone from “engines of growth and opportunity” to places where class relations are increasing fixed, with only the upper end of the income spectrum doing well. Gotham’s one percent earns a third of the entire city’s personal income. That’s almost twice the proportion for the rest of the country. But such class disparity is becoming the norm; in the tech haven of San Francisco, which has the worst levels of inequality in California, the top 5% of households earn an average of $808,105 annually, compared with $16,184 for the lowest 20%.

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California is collapsing

By Joel Kotkin

Predictably, those at the bottom of this new feudal structure suffer the most; today, the old saying that “the city air makes one free” all too often means freedom to be poor, to experience endemic homelessness, collapsing public infrastructure and rising crime.

And that was before Covid hit. Already many poor urban residents subsisted on transfer payments or worked in service industries. They were paid, usually poorly, to clean now-empty offices or work in restaurants and hotels. The lockdowns, whether justified or overwrought, have since pummelled these low-income workers; roughly 40% of Americans earning under $40,000 a year lost their jobs last March.

Unlike workers who occupy “the commanding heights” of finance, tech, marketing, and media , these people did not have the option of working from their kitchen tables or moving to suburban locations or smaller cities. Nor could they count on education systems to work their magic; most schools in American inner-city districts, in contrast to many suburbs and smaller cities, remained closed.

All of which meant America’s urban districts were ripe for civil unrest when George Floyd died last May, and these festering conditions exploded into the worst national rioting in decades. Parts of many cities went up in flames, the damage of which was obscured by mainstream media’s mantra of “mostly peaceful protests”. The constant rioting and demonstrations in Portland, once seen as a paragon of new urbanist-led revival, has all but destroyed its downtown, which is now largely bereft of pedestrians.

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Will Covid spell the end of city life?

By Barney Norris

Remarkably, despite the dramatic rise in homicides, the city seems likely to continue its programme of de-funding the police. In many cities — Los Angeles, Minneapolis, San Francisco, St. Louis, New York — “progressive” district attorneys have worked assiduously to restrain law enforcement. In California, where it is no longer considered a felony to steal anything worth less than $1,000, there has been a surge in property crime, including a huge rise in car thefts. San Francisco, for example, has seen the drug store Walgreens close ten outlets since 2019, citing elevated levels of theft and weak law enforcement. Meanwhile New York’s bodegas, small markets in ethnic neighbourhoods, experienced a 222% increase in burglaries last year.

The repercussions of this extend well beyond the criminal and judicial spheres. As cities slowly fall to pieces, they are increasingly becoming no-go zones for investors and business, except for those who see opportunity investing in suddenly distressed properties; barely ten per cent of US companies are interested in investing in large urban areas. A friend who runs a biomedical company had his warehouse burned down in the post-Floyd Minneapolis riots. When I asked him whether he would rebuild, he said yes — but in the suburbs of Tampa, Florida, or Atlanta.

Yet a number of progressives insist that the current urban exodus of wealthy residents is not a cause for concern, as it allows a more fair society to be “reborn”. Such a naïve approach forgets that there is one problem with expelling the rich: in New York, for example, the “one per cent” pay 43% of the city’s income taxes. The same is also true in California, where the top 1% of the population pays half of all income taxes. Even London now depends almost entirely on the wealthy to keep its economy afloat.

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Charting the decline of the American Republic

By Ed West

But today’s activist Left does not seem to be concerned with economics — or, for that matter, much of the real world. In New York, activists have helped put an end to proposals for new jobs from Amazon, as well as a recent “Industry City” proposal in Brooklyn. In Seattle, the doggedly radical city council is working overtime to also push out Amazon — the company that has driven much of the region’s economic growth — to the surrounding suburbs and other regions.

But expelling tech oligarchs will not stabilise cities, improve the schools or lure business development. It certainly will not correct the fiscal crises faced by many cities, nor generate upwardly mobile jobs. Cities do not thrive by having more cutting-edge coffee shops, trendy restaurants and edgy boutiques; they need safe streets, decent schools and jobs for middle and working-class families.

Wishful thinking will not spark an urban revival. Yes, the decline of first-tier conurbations might enliven smaller cities. But overall, society as a whole will still lose. Dense urban places have always been critical in the development of culture and social behaviours. They remain crossroads of trade for goods as well as ideas, in ways that more dispersed places, even in the internet age, are not always suitable. Our cities are far from perfect. But a post-urban future could be even worse.

The war for control of London’ streets is being fought with traffic bollards, speed cameras and cycle lanes. There have been screaming matches, Facebook flamewars, poison pen letters, nocturnal stickering campaigns and incidents of civil disobedience. Each side is accusing the other of putting lives at risk. The anti-car faction points to the death toll on our roads; their pro-car enemies say that traffic restrictions are causing congestion and impeding emergency vehicles and other vital services.

These tensions have been rumbling away for years, if not decades, but they’ve now reached a whole new level. The recent ramping up of Low Traffic Neighbourhood schemes is a dramatic raising the stakes. The assumption that motorists can drive wherever they will no longer holds. We have entered an era in which the systematic exclusion of motorised traffic is now a realistic policy option and, furthermore, a hyper-localised one.

This is politics at its most up-close-and-personal, which is precisely why it’s become so heated.

*

An Englishman’s home may be his castle, but at his front step or garden gate, his authority comes to an abrupt halt. Just feet away from your twitching net curtains, complete strangers can do or say whatever they want within the law, and come and go as they please.

That might seem obvious, but by the standards of the past, it’s highly unusual. Throughout most of history, the transition from private to public has been rather more complicated than it is for most of us today. Our ancestors didn’t just have homes, they had territory — defended with their neighbours against the stranger. From the smallest village to the walled city, there was a zone beyond private property, in which outsiders could not come and go as they pleased.

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How WEIRD are you?

By Peter Franklin

Over the centuries, security and social trust has become the norm, allowing these zones of control to shrink away. Some remnants still exist: gang rule at one end of the social spectrum, gated communities at the other. But for most of us there’s no buffer zone between the completely private and the fully public. The one borders directly upon the other — a miracle of social harmony that we take for granted.

Perhaps that’s why we’ve surrendered control over our neighbourhoods. The streetscape beyond your property is a regulated space. There are speed limits, planning laws, licensing regimes and policing policies. But for the most part we’re content if the key decisions are made miles away — by office-holders we’ve never heard of, chosen by people we’ve never met. Most of us don’t even vote in local elections, let alone participate in community decision-making more directly. 

On-street parking is one of the few issues on which local residents do fight their corner. We see the tarmac right outside our homes as part of the private realm not the public — and therefore as belonging to us morally, if not legally. But beyond these jealously defended patches is neutral territory, open to all and therefore not really our business. 

That’s why London’s road wars, while farcical in some ways, are also highly significant: residents are asserting their control not just over parking spaces, but over the whole of the streetscape that defines each neighbourhood.

*

The trigger for this growing conflict is scarcity. As I’ve written about before, road space is running out. Whenever a resource becomes scarce, it becomes contested — in this case between motorists, cyclists, pedestrians and other users. Covid-19 has added fuel to the flames, by driving people off the buses and trains and into their cars — or onto their bikes or feet.

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Gen Z’s favorite rabbi

By Peter Franklin

It’s not just a conflict between incompatible modes of transport. Viewed locally, it’s also a clash of interests between residents and outsiders. Especially contentious is the issue of ‘rat runs’ — the use of residential streets by motorists seeking to avoid congestion elsewhere. 

It’s not a new cause for complaint, of course, but three factors are bringing matters to a head: firstly, the increased volumes of road traffic I mentioned above; secondly, the fact that many more people are now working from home and thus have all day to experience the rat run on the doorstep; and thirdly, the contrast between the current situation and the calm of the deep lockdown period earlier this year.

The bright and eerie Covid spring was deeply unsettling, but there was one compensation — millions of us got a chance to live life free from the noise, fumes and danger of motorised traffic. It’s an experience that raises an important question: why can’t it be like that all the time? 

The potency of the Local Traffic Neighbourhood is that it opens up that very possibility. According to The Guardian, more than 200 schemes are in the works or already being trialed — most of them in London. 

These interventions go well beyond mere ‘traffic calming’. Through-traffic isn’t just slowed down: most of it is kept out. Each Low Traffic Neighbourhood is defined as a ‘cell’ of residential streets, access to which is restricted using ‘modal filters’ that are meant to discourage the wrong modes of transport (e.g. cars), encourage the right ones (e.g. bicycles) and accommodate the necessary sort (e.g. emergency vehicles). Some of these filters are technologically sophisticated — for instance, the use of number plate recognition systems to distinguish between residents’ vehicles and outside traffic. Others are really quite crude — for instance the use of heavy planters to block-off access to particular streets. 

As one might imagine, the public reaction to the LTNs has been mixed. Some people are delighted, especially local residents (though not all of them). Other people, especially motorists, are apoplectic. Cars have been filmed mounting pavements to drive around newly installed barriers. In other cases, the obstacles have been removed or even vandalised.

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The case for taking more risks

By John Gray

Obviously anyone who engages in criminal and/or threatening behaviour should be condemned out of hand. But that aside, one should understand the passions on all sides. Residents want the places where they and their families live to be safe, peaceful and unpolluted. Cyclists want to cycle without fear of death and injury. For their part, motorists want to get themselves to work and their children safely to school.

Again, Covid is raising the temperature. We’ve had months of restrictions, of being told where we can go, who we can meet and what we have to wear on our faces. We’ve had our livelihoods put in peril and our social lives wiped out. An LTN, while a blessed relief to some, is whole heap of new restrictions for others.

*

This is a combustible mix of rival interests and local politicians are struggling to cope. In the London Borough of Ealing, the council leader narrowly survived a vote of no-confidence, provoked by the LTN controversy. Meanwhile in Wandsworth the council has suspended all LTNs across the borough, pending a review. I wouldn’t be surprised if we see more of this — politicians lowering the temperature by simply freezing the issue.

But this would be a mistake. A true democracy does not suppress disagreement or disempower people desperate for change. Indeed, those who claim to be concerned about the ‘deep divisions’ caused by this or that controversial issue should themselves be regarded with wariness. Most likely, what their concerns actually amount to is a bad faith argument for privileging the status quo or allowing the views of the in-group to pass without challenge. Beyond sensible laws against hate speech and the harassment of political opponents, we must be free to argue out our differences. 

This may result in compromise or even consensus, but it doesn’t have to. Democracy also legitimises the complete victory of one side over the other. And sometimes that’s the only way. In regard to Brexit, there were compromises that could have been made on the precise trade relationship between Britain and the EU, but the primary issue was binary. Either we remained part of a project to build a supranational state or we left it. It had to be one or the other — and it was entirely right to ask the British people to decide the matter. 

Binary decisions have to be made at a local level too. Do we allow a residential street to be used as a rat run or don’t we? It’s a yes/no question — but, in this case, who should decide? That’s not quite so clear, but it doesn’t seem unreasonable for the fate of a residential street to be decided by its residents. 

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How communities lost their soul

By Nicholas Boys Smith

There are complications though. Less traffic on your street might mean more traffic on somebody else’s. Presumably, people who live along main roads aren’t going to be allowed an LTN of their own — and that sets up an unhealthy class dynamic in which the richer, leafier parts of the city are improved while poorer areas are further downgraded.

As it stands, the LTN system allows for some troubling asymmetries of power. However, that’s not because democracy has become too local, but because it’s still not local enough. If, for instance, we had a fully localised road pricing system then revenues could be allocated more precisely to those neighbourhoods that are forced to put up with the worst traffic. The money could be used to fund environmental improvements — such as turning ugly arterial roads into tree-lined boulevards. Alternatively, residents could receive direct financial compensation. 

Needless to say, road charging should always and aggressively penalise the most polluting vehicles. If it’s asymmetries of power that we’re worried about, then let’s start with what comes out of the exhaust pipe of diesel-fuelled SUV (and goes into our lungs.)

*

Far from making the road wars go away, we should welcome them. This is just the sort of meaningful argument that we need to reinvigorate local democracy — in fact, democracy as a whole. However, we will have to rethink the neutrality of the public realm. Public highways will remain public, but local residents would have a much bigger say over how they get used. 

I don’t know if the current, rather centralising, Government likes that idea; but it was they who told us to “take back control”. 

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Are you joining the Covid exodus?

By Louise Perry

I suppose — to be charitable for a moment — this is what used to be called planning, getting ahead of the problem. But futurists take all this to quite another level. They are usually highly serious, geeky overgrown teenagers, generally men, who have been brought up on way too much science fiction. And they have turned what is basically a sucked finger raised into the air into a highly technical sounding art form. As the old Yiddish proverb has it: “Man plans and God laughs.”

Even so, all this MIT-meets-end-of-the-pier stuff does sometimes have interesting things to say. And the American futurist Jordan Hall’s “Civium Project” is a case in point.

Civium is a way of looking at cities, and specifically what a post-city world might look like. It imagines an alliance between technology and the countryside replacing the city as the focus of creativity and wealth-creation. It is the idea that there is no longer much point living in the middle of a large conurbation when you can now move out, look at fields through your window, breathe clean air, and do all your meetings with video conferencing. Covid has accelerated this fantasy. Rightmove has just announced that August has been one of the busiest months ever for buying and selling houses, with many moving to places such as Cornwall and Devon.

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“Cities are to people like stars are to atoms,” explains Hall. Like stars, cities have this inward gravitational pull. The more people that pack into an area, the more ideas it buzzes with and the greater its capacity to make money. The bigger the city, the more money (on average) that one can make there — so he argues. It’s all about the economies of scale. But just as there is a centripetal force that sucks in people, so too there is a centrifugal force that pushes them out. Because people have bodies, they take up physical space, and have physical needs like food. Thus the dynamic of the city is created by the intense inward pressure of the economic pull to the centre, and the resistance to this constant pull that our physicality engenders. People can only be packed in a small space so much before they want to break out of it.

But can technology — always the futurists’ deus ex machina — really square this circle? The Civium project imagines that the density of people that has made the city so much of a money spinner can now be recreated online. Indeed, when people can be translated into digital images, they can be packed together even more tightly, with even greater creativity and prosperity being created. The “gallery view” of Zoom, for example, allows many people to cram into the tiniest of spaces. And if density of people = creativity = prosperity, then the city as we have known it is doomed — because in the digital realm, the thing that attracted people together, what Hall calls “minds in relationship” can be de-coupled from the negative consequences of being physically piled up on top of each other.

The Civium imagines that we can have it both ways. We can live by the River Tamar, soothed by gentle music, without a neighbour for miles — yet we can also, and without commuting, instantly become a member of the sort of community that has made cities the economic hubs of civilisation for centuries. Yes, online conferencing has its own unique ennui to contend with. But that’s why we are moving to the Tamar. With all that time saved not commuting, there will be ample opportunity to chill out in your hammock and work off that disturbing feeling of existential dislocation with some good, old fashioned, country walks.

“It’s because minds are embodied that we have cities. Up until very recently the only way for minds to interact was to have bodies close to each other,” Hall says.

In other words, cities were an unfortunate consequence of the fact that minds have to carry around with them their physical bodies. Today, however, the virtual world allows us to jettison those bodies when we want to be “minds in relationship” and then relax by the river when we want to put body and soul back together again. This will not be an “adjunct to civilisation” Hall argues, but “a fully symmetric basis to civilisation with the physical side”.

He even imagines the virtual, the Civium, could represent a “single city” with the kind of scale to be maximally generative in terms of wealth creation. This is Capitalism 2.0.

What most interests me most about Hall’s proposal is that it recreates in such sharp focus our old friend the mind/body dualism and of a sort very similar to that imagined by the philosopher René Descartes, he of “I think therefore I am” fame. Hall’s idea of “minds in relationship”, and minds that have jettisoned their troublesome physicality, would inscribe into the very basis of civilisation the division that has created so much philosophical trouble since Descartes.

Perhaps the best way to critique the Civium project would be to argue that minds do not have relationships: only people do. And people are an indivisible unity of mind and body.

Yes, it is unfair to suggest that Hall neglects the body — after all, his vision of the bucolic life freed from the crowded, polluting, traffic rammed city is in many ways a return to our one-ness with the natural world. But this is achieved by pulling us apart — the creative, innovative mental part of ourselves making money in the virtual world and the bodily part being soothed in the physical.

And I am highly suspicious of this split. Physicality has a much greater role in innovation and creativity than Hall allows. In many disciplines, creativity is a very tactile business. My wife, for example, teaches weaving at university. She researches innovation in weaving technology. But it’s almost impossible to imagine what this could mean as simply “minds in relationship”.

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Do humans have a future?

By Tom Chivers

Likewise, to pick another example among many, the sort of trust that is necessary for creative and economic collaboration requires a much stronger sense of the face to face encounter than made possible over a screen. Morality is a remarkably physical business, I find. The obligations we have to other people make much more sense when we can see and touch them.

I began this piece being rather rude about futurists. I called them geeks — which is partly a way of talking about physical awkwardness, I suppose. Now I know that, these days, geeks are people with extraordinary power. They are the algorithm creators that shape so much of our lives.

And what terrifies me about the Civium project is that it is a way of imagining the world in which all this geeky awkwardness about physical bodies is turned into a civilisational principle.

The Mods were the Modernisers — reformists who wanted to ‘detoxify’ the Tory ‘brand’. They talked like a bunch of PR consultants, because that’s what a lot of them were. They saw themselves as forward-looking, sophisticated and socially liberal. Unlike the old Tory ‘Wets’ they were economically liberal too and moderately Eurosceptic (but minus the Thatcheresque baggage). Their message to the party was change or die.

They were opposed by the Rockers (also known as the Headbangers), who thought that change was death — a betrayal of everything that real Conservatives stood for.

The split wasn’t without its complications. There were those, like William Hague (Tory leader from 1997 to 2001) who tried to straddle the divide. However, the messiness of the compromises only increased the bitterness of the conflict.

At the time, I was a very junior apparatchik working in Conservative Central Office. During the 2001 leadership contest, I remember the partisans of Michael Portillo — the candidate of the Mods — striding around the building as if they already owned the place. Staffers were quizzed as to their loyalties and with a smile I told them I’d be “voting for Michael” — the joke being that the only person standing against Portillo at the time was the party chairman and Hague loyalist, Michael Ancram.

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Not so rosy: the legacy of the Coalition government

By Peter Franklin

In the event, neither of the Michaels would become leader; instead, the crown went to Iain Duncan Smith, who back then was the Rockers’ Rocker. That set off a further round of Tory Wars, followed by a truce under a third Michael (Michael Howard) and finally the ascent of David Cameron.

By that time, and with the scent of power once more in Tory nostrils, the whole Mods versus Rockers thing was burning out. The factions parked their scooters and motorbikes and looked forward to their ministerial cars. In any case a new divide was beginning to open up — Leave versus Remain — and, as we know, that would change everything.

And yet there’s one aspect of the old conflict that still persists. It’s about how to build an election-winning coalition. The true blue Tory heartlands aren’t enough on their own. To get from second place to first, the Conservatives need to reach out to another section of the electorate. But which one? For the Mods the answer was always obvious — people rather like themselves: young(ish), university-educated professionals. The Rockers wanted an alternative coalition, but as to what it might be they had no convincing answer — which is why they lost their war with the Mods.

However, in the 2016 Brexit referendum and the 2019 general election, Dominic Cummings, Boris Johnson and Michael Gove (all former Mods, ironically) cracked the problem. They forged an alliance not between the Tory Shires and Cool Britannia, but between the Tory Shires and the Red Wall — the supposedly uncool towns and suburbs of Northern England, the Midlands and Wales.

Further reading

Can the Tories cling on to the Red Wall?

By David Jeffrey

Daniel Finkelstein — associate editor of The Times and Peer of the realm — is a Mod grandee. He was a senior advisor to William Hague and David Cameron and, among many other contributions, wrote their best lines.

Last week, he used his Times column to attack the un-Moddishness of the Government’s political and economic strategy. This is the policy of “levelling-up” — i.e. pumping investment into left-behind parts of the country to achieve a lasting realignment of wealth, power and party loyalties. Can it succeed? Finkelstein has his doubts:

“The supposed political dividend for the Tories is that it will enable them to win and retain support among older, less prosperous, less well educated (note: not less intelligent, just less well educated) and more culturally conservative voters.

“I have always questioned whether this strategy is sustainable in the long run.”

Well, let’s make some long run comparisons between the Cameron era and what followed. In both 2010 and 2015, David Cameron and George Osborne went with the Mod strategy of appealing to younger, more prosperous, well educated and culturally progressive voters. Up to a point, they succeeded. In 2010, they increased the Tory vote share from 32.4% to 36.1%. In 2015, they pushed it up a bit further to 36.9%. Not too bad, but a long way from breaking through the 40% barrier.

It was Theresa May who managed that — getting 42.4% of the vote in 2017. Two years later, Boris Johnson pushed the share even higher to 43.6%. Add in the Brexit referendum as well — and it seems obvious to me that the Moderniser’s coalition is significantly smaller than the populist alternative.

Of course, in many ways the snap election of 2017 was a fiasco. While the blame for the Conservative campaign has been pinned on Nick Timothy alone, the fact is that it was disastrously conceived and executed in almost every respect. And yet despite the omnishambles, the Tory vote share still soared to levels not seen since 1992 — a stress test of the soundness of the underlying strategy.

The competent but uninspiring campaign of 2019 provided further confirmation — delivering a majority of 80 and a stunning gain of 50 seats across the Red Wall regions.

Further reading

Whose side is Labour on?

By Paul Embery

OK, that’s the politics, but what about the economic sustainability of the populist path? Can the levelling-up agenda really deliver the jobs and prosperity that the Conservatives have promised to their new supporters?

Finkelstein’s core criticism is that the people who create prosperity are not those who the Government is trying to appeal to. Therefore the Government’s approach is fundamentally incoherent:

“Social liberalism and economic prosperity go together. Whatever the political pros and cons of combining levelling up with an attack on metropolitan values, I don’t think it will work economically.”

Indeed, “in order to match the success and power of metropolitan areas, non-metropolitan places need to become more . . . metropolitan.”

It’s a thought-provoking argument, but is it a sound one? It strikes me that it rests on three basic assumptions. Firstly, that there is indeed a ‘Creative Class’ whose presence is the vital determinant of whether an area is successful or not. Secondly, that left-behind areas can only become more successful if they become more metropolitan. And thirdly, that the values of either the Government or left-behind Britain are so culturally conservative as to have a negative impact on the economy.

Let’s have a look at each of these in turn.

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Gen Z’s favorite rabbi

By Peter Franklin

Firstly, the concept of a crucially important Creative Class.

Finkelstein gets this from the theories of Richard Florida, an American academic. The Creative Class are the artists, innovators, entrepreneurs and other ground breakers who pioneer the regeneration of up-and-coming neighbourhoods, start up new businesses and generate the excitement on which economic revival depends. These are the agents of change and if you can lure them to your community, then all sorts of other good stuff will follow. Or, as Finkelstein puts it:

“To be successful, places need to attract and keep members of this creative class. Florida suggests one way to do this is to improve night life, cultural attractions and a reputation for tolerance and diversity.”

Nice theory, but is it true? Finkelstein mentions one sceptic — Edward Glaeser — who points out that cities cannot live on cool alone and also have to attend to the dull stuff because “creative people have children too”. Glaeser’s critique goes rather further than that, however.

He crunches the numbers and finds that if the creative class is narrowly defined — i.e. the authentic arty-farty types — then, no, it doesn’t make much difference to economic outcomes. Yes, the trendsetters are, by definition, the first to move into an up-and-coming area. But that doesn’t mean they’re the reason it’s up-and-coming. They’re like the robins and blackbirds who show up when a garden is dug and planted. Perfectly charming, but it wasn’t them who turned the sod.

This is why using public money to build the sort of buildings that boring people think might be attractive to interesting people doesn’t work. Funding committees do love an ugly shed filled with second-tier modern art and less-than-compelling museum exhibits, but theirs is the logic of the cargo cult. Even if the attractions weren’t so unattractive, the understanding of the cause-and-effect is completely wrong. Bureaucratic fiat won’t turn, say, the Black Country into the abode of hipsters — and even if it could, it wouldn’t be much help.

But about the wider Creative Class? On a broader definition, Finkelstein suggests that it could include up to 40% of the population. But at such a large proportion of the workforce, the description loses all meaning — it’s just a fancy label for anyone with skills that command an above average salary. This group is associated with economic productivity, but they wouldn’t get paid what they do if they weren’t.

What makes them productive? Well, with all due respect, it isn’t just down to their innate talents. They are the beneficiaries of an education system that privileges academic over technical qualifications. They live in parts of the country — especially London — that get the lion’s share of public spending on research and infrastructure. And they work in sectors that have been favoured by long-term government policies at the expense of other sectors. For instance, a tax regime that sucks foreign capital into the UK property market and other speculative bubbles is good for landowners and the financial sector, but, thanks to the impact on exchange rates, bad for manufacturers and other exporters.

Further reading

We'd never build another Albert Hall

By Mary Harrington

As for left-behind communities needing to become more metropolitan, the fact is that many of them are metropolitan. This is one of the most urban countries in the world. Beyond our capital, seven of the eight biggest cities in England are in the Midlands and the North.

There’s nothing undiverse about Manchester, Liverpool, Leeds, Sheffield, Nottingham, Newcastle and Birmingham. Their streets are full of sounds, sights and tastes from all around the world. These are university cities too — with big student populations and the nightlife and radical politics to match.

And yet set against comparable cities in France and Germany, there’s a long record of these communities underperforming economically against the national average. That’s not because they’re insufficiently metropolitan, but because they’ve been systematically starved of power and resources. Just look at the ramshackle transport links within and between Liverpool, Manchester, Leeds and Sheffield. Collectively, these cities and their wider city regions form one of the great conurbations of the world. Indeed, as the birthplace of the Industrial Revolution, this is where the modern world came into being. We should regard it as a great national asset, but instead its been marginalised.

One of the best things that Cameron and Osborne ever did was to recognise the potential of the Northern Powerhouse — and to start returning resources and decision-making power to its city-regions. But to keep this progress going in the right direction is a constant battle — Whitehall resistance to the creation of a powerful Transport for the North being a case in point.

Or consider the split between central and local government spending over the last 25 years. Tom Forth shows us that of the five biggest European economies, Britain is the only one where the share of GDP spent by central government has grown, while that spent by local government has shrunk. Whether or not one believes that left-behind Britain needs to become more metropolitan, it’s an unfortunate metropolis that can’t direct its own future.

Further reading

Why did a rundown mining town become a safe Tory seat?

By James Bloodworth

But of course Daniel Finkelstein isn’t just talking about the places, but also the people — and, to his mind, left-behind Britain is lacking in the right sort. “The problem with the metropolitan ‘elite’ isn’t that there is too much of it”, he says, “it’s that there aren’t enough members of it, drawn from a wide enough background and living in enough places.”

If by ‘elite’ he means graduates, then we produce lots of those already — and from the most impressive line-up of universities of any county outside America. Where Britain is at a clear disadvantage, however, is in intermediate skills — i.e. those that provide the best opportunities for the non-graduate population. As a 2016 report from the Centre for Cities shows, skills provision in Britain outside London and the South East is abysmal — comparable to the poorest parts of southern and eastern Europe.

That we went to such great lengths to expand our the university system while neglecting technical education is a national scandal. The current Government has indicated a long overdue change of direction, but why so many decades of neglect? It is because the metropolitan elite used their position of centralised control to invest in people like themselves — while sidelining everyone else.

It didn’t have to be this way. The imperatives of the knowledge economy could have been interpreted more inclusively. Other countries, like Germany and Switzerland, created technical systems that have have spread economic opportunity instead of concentrating it. We could have done the same, but chose not to.

A more even spread of investment in skills — and also infrastructure and R&D — would also encourage a more even spread of the graduate workforce, which is not in short supply, just overly bunched-up.

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Finally, the question of values.

I don’t believe that showing a bit of respect for left-behind communities — their aspirations, their identities, their loyalties — constitutes an “attack on metropolitan values”.

Nor does it threaten economic development. Regional economies are geographically and sociologically complex. There are the urban centres, with their youthful, transient, bourgeois bohemian populations. And then there are the outer suburbs, smaller cities, outlying towns and countryside that are necessarily different in character. That doesn’t mean that they can’t coexist or don’t need one another or won’t share in the same prosperity. Economies thrive on diversity and that includes viewpoint diversity. After all, it works pretty well in London and the surrounding region. Edgy, achingly hip neighbourhoods like Dalston are just a short commute away from the Essex outskirts where a working class conservatism holds sway instead.

It was in seats like Romford and Upminster where the Conservative revival started back in early 2000s. At the time, with the Tory Wars still raging, I remember the Mods telling us to disregard these results — because such areas were not typical of the nation as a whole.

However, it turned out that they were a prototype for the leave-voting seats where Boris Johnson won his thumping majority last year. Essex showed that working class electorates will respond positively if they feel the Conservative Party respects their small-c conservative values and also cares about their economic well-being. Being linked into the engine of prosperity that is London, meant that it was easier for Essex Man and Woman to believe this.

Hundreds of miles from the capital, it took the voters of the Red Wall a lot longer to be convinced. The Conservatives had to prove themselves. Getting Brexit Done was the first part of the deal and, now, levelling-up is the second.

These new Tory voters just want the same opportunities as their southern counterparts. And there’s no reason why they shouldn’t have them. What already works in London and the South East can work elsewhere — and to everyone’s benefit.

Organised by the magazine Building Design, it has (in my aesthetic judgement) produced a worthy shortlist and a worthy winner every year since its inception in 2006.

But there’s a big problem with the prize — not its subjectivity, but the fact that the winning buildings still exist. Indeed, buildings like them are still being built. Name-and-shame is not working.

There’s an argument to be made that things are getting worse. We’ve swapped the horrendous, but interesting, brutalism of the post-war period for the offensively bland spreadsheet architecture of the 21st century. In an age in which Jane Jacobs has won the intellectual battle against Robert Moses, we really ought to know better. Yet we continue to fill up our towns and cities with inhumane, alienating architecture.

Suggested reading

The hideous spread of 'spreadsheet architecture'

By Peter Franklin

It’s environmentally destructive too. For instance, around Victoria Street in London you see buildings that went up within living memory now being demolished and replaced. Though that’s no great loss to our heritage, it can’t be sustainable to throw-up these great piles of concrete, glass and steel only to tear them down again a few decades later. Is it not too much to ask our architects to design buildings that won’t just enhance our lives, but also outlive us?

It might seem paradoxical, but to end the cycle of destruction, we need to accelerate it. Every year, there should be a public vote to choose the worst new building in the land. The winner wouldn’t get a cup, but a wrecking ball. Yes, that’s right, it would be physically demolished — immediately and without compensation. Indeed, the owner would be required to foot the bill for the building’s de-construction (though they would have the option of suing the architect and the planning authority).

This would concentrate minds wonderfully. Instead of competing among themselves to épater les bourgeois, starchitects would need to design with due regard to the common good. Meanwhile, developers whose sole objective is to squeeze as much profitable square footage into any site they can get their hands on, would have to contend with the possibility of financial (as well as literal) ruin. The planners would come under immense pressure to do a better job too. At the cost of sacrificing one new building, development across the land would be greatly improved.

There’d be a minimum threshold of votes required to trigger a compulsory demolition, so by achieving a broad consensus behind new development — not least by properly involving local people in a positive planning and design process — it’s possible that no new building would have to come down.

But can the people be trusted? By placing the wrecking ball in their hands, would we imperil innovative projects that shock a lot of people at the time that they’re built, but come to be loved? Here I don’t mean the concrete monstrosities that sophistication-signallers like to rave over on Twitter, but genuine wonders like the Eiffel Tower.

We could, perhaps, complement the vote-to-demolish with a vote-to-save, but beyond that I am inclined to trust the people. Indeed, radical democratisation would do more good than harm, freeing architecture from the stifling conformity imposed by elite taste-makers and those who pay for their work.

Suggested reading

How communities lost their soul

By Nicholas Boys Smith

If there is a flaw in my modest proposal it’s that the focus would be on the tallest, flashiest new buildings — and therefore London. The problem isn’t that these aren’t crap, but that less prominent crappiness in other parts of the country might get overlooked. The prize therefore should be regionalised, with categories for a different scales and types of development. After all, we don’t just need well-designed, sustainable landmarks but also beautiful houses, shops and other everyday buildings.

Some of you might think that I’m ignoring the real objection to my idea — which is that the state can’t go round demolishing newly-built, structurally-sound private property. But it can and sometimes does. You could build a brilliantly-designed dwelling in an area that desperately needs more homes, but if you do so without planning permission, it’ll be knocked down. That’s the law.

Admittedly, my idea concerns buildings that have got planning permission. But that’s precisely the point: the planning system as it stands is failing. Over-and-over again it stops the development we do need while allowing development that makes places worse. Despite recent reforms, the system remains opaque, important decisions are made behind closed doors and the whole process advantages the rich and powerful over ordinary people.

Suggested reading

How beauty shapes our fates

By Phillip Blond

Unlike bad art or bad literature, bad architecture is something that whole communities are forced to live with. Our existing laws clearly doesn’t provide them with the protection they need, so we must redress the balance. I’d prefer it if we could move to a fully democratic, consensus-based planning system, but that won’t happen unless the developers, and the financiers behind them, are incentivised to make it work.

My proposal provides the incentive. I’ll admit it does so in a brutal, uncompromising manner, but fans of modernism should surely approve of that. 

Different cultures, colours, creeds, classes, languages and identities of every kind: all are included. Except for one group of people who find themselves increasingly excluded from the urban milieu: children.

Further reading

Can you afford parenthood?

By Peter Franklin

It’s a phenomenon explored by Derek Thompson in a must-read piece for The Atlantic:

“In high-density cities… no group is growing faster than rich college-educated whites without children, according to Census analysis by the economist Jed Kolko. By contrast, families with children older than 6 are in outright decline in these places. In the biggest picture, it turns out that America’s urban rebirth is missing a key element: births.”

Consider the statistics for New York:

“Since 2011, the number of babies born in New York has declined 9 percent in the five boroughs and 15 percent in Manhattan.”

Or Washington DC:

“…the overall population has grown more than 20 percent this century, but the number of children under the age of 18 has declined.”

Or the tech capital of the world:

“San Francisco has the lowest share of children of any of the largest 100 cities in the U.S.”

The great global cities are portrayed as places of youth and vibrancy. They certainly attract ambitious, highly educated twenty-somethings – which is why big companies base themselves there: so that they can take their pick of the brightest young minds. This is especially true of the tech sector.

In 2007, it was reported that Mark Zuckerberg, founder of Facebook, told a conference that “young people are just smarter.” Zuckerberg himself was only 24 at the time and well on the way to global domination – and thus could be excused for thinking such a thing (which, in any case, is correct in some respects).

He’s also reported as saying that “Young people just have simpler lives. We may not have a car. We may not have a family.” In a long-hours working culture, that’s something that adds to their employability – and another reason why top employers love big cities.

The heaving metropolis doesn’t just concentrate bright young things in one place, it also ensures that they can be worked without distraction. The sky-high property prices that put city-centre family homes beyond the reach of most young workers are a feature not a bug. They stop reproduction from getting in the way of productivity.

Further reading

The world's most successful* people get enough sleep

By Peter Franklin

Family life isn’t solely about having children of our own, of course. It’s also about continued participation in the families we were born into – and, beyond that, a wider circle of friends and neighbours. To take one’s place in a community, to learn from others so that responsibilities can be handed from one generation to the next, is (or was) part of becoming an adult – as much as getting a job or getting married.

The concentration of young talent in big cities severs these connections too; distance weakens established old family ties just as property prices discourage new ones.

But does this matter? There’s plenty of time in one’s thirties and forties to quit the city and do the whole family and community thing somewhere less frenetic. So why shouldn’t twenty-somethings – excuse me while I vomit – ‘work hard and play hard’?

It’s a neat idea, but collapsing birthrates around the world suggest that many people never make up for lost time. I wonder where the big employers hope to find the next generation of eager recruits if they’re not even being born? Immigration is only a stop-gap because western demographic trends are spreading to developing countries.

There are political consequences too. Derek Thompson describes America’s great divide:

“With its rich blue cities and red rural plains, the U.S. has an economy biased toward high-density areas but an electoral system biased toward low-density areas. The discrepancy has the trappings of a constitutional crisis.  The richest cities have become magnets for redundant masses of young rich liberals, making them electorally impotent.”

Any group of voters (e.g. college educated urban liberals) who concentrate themselves in a few locations are not only likely to lose elections – but also to be shocked when they do. After all, almost everyone they know thinks and votes the way they do – so, how does the ‘other side’ keep winning? It must be some kind of trick!

The sense of bewilderment is accentuated by one of resentment. If the cities are generating most of the money and thus ‘subsidising’ other parts of the country, then suburban and provincial voting preferences are perceived as ingratitude if not outright stupidity.

Of course, if you’re relying on other parts of the country to supply most of the people – it shouldn’t be so surprising if they perceive you as dependent on them.

Thompson sums it all up as a “division of labour”:

“America’s rich cities specialize in the young, rich, and childless; America’s suburbs specialize in parents.”

But while a division of labour may work in a factory – different workers specialising in only one part of the job – it can’t work in a country. Each component community, whether urban, suburban or rural, has to do the whole job of being a community, finding a place for people at every stage of life.

A truly flourishing community is an extended family, joining together the generations. The childless city, however, is something quite different: an extended workplace. For all its diversity, it is fundamentally incomplete.

Further reading

How WEIRD are you?

By Peter Franklin

But one thing can make it all better – the common grace of greenery. Foliage has many proven benefits – it not only shades and cools, but also improves aesthetics, acoustics and air quality.

It’s ironic that, despite all our advances in civil engineering, the force we rely on most to re-civilise the city is what we design our buildings to keep out: nature.

Suggested reading

How sexist is your air conditioning?

By Peter Franklin

In quite the turnaround, we’re now using technology to make room for nature on every available surface – and not just the horizontal ones. Writing for The Guardian, Harriet Sherwood looks at the increasing popularity of the vertical garden or ‘living wall’:

“Living walls range from simple wire structures to support climbing plants to sophisticated modular systems, using soil or hydroponic manmade substrate, and solar-powered irrigation. The cost ranges from £200 to £800 per square metre.”

These had a bad reputation for a while – thanks to to some very visible failures when expensively installed living walls (and green roofs) died off. However, maintenance systems are improving – and will only get better. Indeed, here’s a prediction: one of the most visible signs that a society has truly reached ‘the Robot Age’ will be that its cities turn green – an army of little climbing drones weeding and watering vertical gardens everywhere.

Of course, we already have a widely available system for maintaining large amounts of foliage several storeys up in the air – it’s called a tree.

On phys.org website, Ben Long describes a recent study from the University of Wollongong. The researchers found that urban tree cover had a measurable impact on physical and mental health:

“In neighbourhoods with a tree canopy of 30 percent or more, adults had 31 percent lower odds of developing psychological distress, and 33 percent lower odds of rating their general health as ‘fair’ or ‘poor’ over six years…

“The longitudinal study tracked the changes in health of around 46,000 people aged 45 and older living in Sydney, Newcastle and Wollongong. Statistical analyses took into account other possible explanations, including differences in age, sex, income, education, employment status, and relationship status.”

However, not all green space is equal:

“Urban green spaces with open grass rather than a tree canopy did not deliver the same benefits.”

Why the difference? Ben Long mentions the shading and cooling that trees provide, but also “sensory relief in urban areas dominated by hard surfaces, right angles, glass and concrete, and intrusive, attention-seeking advertising.”

The cynic might observe that trees make the urban environment better because they cover it up. Certainly, one can discern a philosophical difference between the ‘tree-lined avenue’ of traditional urban architecture and the ‘towers-in-the-park’ ideal of the modernists. With the former there is a subtle interplay between the natural and built environments; with the latter, nature is pared back to give the artificial a position of unchallenged dominance.

Suggested reading

The hideous spread of 'spreadsheet architecture'

By Peter Franklin

One could go even deeper and go with the theory that traditional architecture is arborial in origin and inspiration. The pillars and arches of our buildings; the perpendicular framing of their doors and windows; their vaulted ceilings and the tracery of their ornamentation: all are echoes of the forest.

Indeed, the fundamentals of a pleasing streetscape – texture, colour, variation in a pattern, the fractal order of form and structure – are essentially natural.

Modernist architecture is a rejection of those qualities – and thus of nature itself. I’m not surprised that our bodies and minds suffer in the impoverished environment thus constructed.

Suggested reading

A path towards Tory detoxification

By Peter Franklin

Repairing the damage we’ve done is the work of many generations, but there are things we can do to start making a difference right now. Writing for The Conversation, Olivia Norfolk explains that councils up and down the country could do something important by not doing something:

“Plantlife, a British conservation charity, has called on councils to turn their road verges into wildflower meadows by cutting just once in late summer, between mid-July and September. Cutting late gives flowers time to be pollinated, produce fruit and then set their seeds in the soil, so that the meadow can grow back year after year.”

Cutting less often and later would produce real benefits for biodiversity at no financial cost – indeed, it would save money.

According to Dr Norfolk, the UK road network is 246,000 miles long – so presumably that means nearly half a million miles of verges. Obviously, not all are suitable for wildflower meadows, while others have them already. But it’s a reminder of just how extensive the built environment is in this country and its potential significance as a habitat for wildlife.

Almost everywhere we look we have opportunities to welcome nature back into our lives. And it’s not only biodiversity that would flourish, but also human wellbeing.

If our new government is looking for a post-Brexit national mission, then the greening of our towns and cities would be a wonderful place to start.

In British politics, the green belt is regarded with equal trepidation. Only last week, Tory leadership rivals, Boris Johnson and Jeremy Hunt, agreed that building more homes should not mean building on the restricted development zones that surround London and other UK cities.

Those hoping that a change of Prime Minister might bring change were disappointed. For instance, James Forsyth of The Spectator made his feelings known:

“Boris Johnson and Jeremy Hunt on the green belt is so depressing. If Britain ceases to be a property owning democracy, the centre right will not win elections.”

Frustration is mounting. After 13 years in which New Labour created the housing crisis, the Tories have spent the last nine years not solving it. In all that time, the green belt has remained sacrosanct – despite rising house prices and falling levels of home ownership.

Suggested reading

Slaying dragons: the stifling British green belt

By Ian Birrell

However, on the pro-development side, I fear that the green belt has become an inverted taboo, something that must be violated in order to prove one’s commitment to the worthy cause of homes for all. Indeed, the most fanatical of the anti-nimbys positively embrace the concept of sprawl.

Yet according to Ellie Anzilotti for Fast Company, public demand is shifting away from the suburbs. Instead of assuming an unchanging American dream, researchers from George Washington University and Smart Growth America took a look at where Americans are choosing to live now:

“…sprawling communities of single-family homes that require a car to navigate are not what’s drawing people anymore. What’s popular now are places where people can live in mixed-use, multifamily housing—maybe an apartment building above a coffee shop—and walk, bike, or take transit to get around.”

Their report, Foot Traffic Ahead: Ranking Walkable Urbanism in America’s Largest Metros, identifies 761 densely built, but liveable, communities in urban centres across America. Collectively, they only cover less than 1% of America’s 30 biggest metro areas, but in terms of new development they are all important:

“While sprawling, suburban districts have added no new development and in some cases, lost occupancy since 2010, nearly all new office and multifamily housing construction has clustered in these 761 areas.”

Similar trends are visible in Britain too – with the fashion for city centre living no longer limited to London. But it isn’t just a fad. The knowledge economy puts a premium on connection and therefore proximity. The plum jobs are bunched up together in the superstar cities. Moreover, there’s a growing reaction, especially among the young, against car-centric lifestyles – not only on environmental grounds, but also because of the cost and hassle of ownership.

By definition, space in city centres is constrained; and, as demonstrated by the Mayor of London’s rejection of planning permission for the Tulip tower, there are limits to vertical development. So does that mean we’ll have to default to sprawl whether we like it or not? Will the bright young things have no choice but to become the Margo and Jerry Leadbetters of the 21st century?

Further reading

The false promise of the vertical city

By Peter Franklin

I don’t think so, because though city-loving hipsters tend to grow up, start families and even buy houses and cars, they’re not going to conform exactly to the lifestyles of their parents and grandparents. They will want to maintain access to the economic and cultural opportunities to which they’ve become accustomed – as well as new priorities like good schools.

Fortunately, there is a third model for providing more homes. As Anzilotti writes “density and walkability do not have to be limited to the urban core”. The future is one of ‘polycentric development’ – i.e. not just one focal point right in the middle of the metropolis, but other hubs further out – “connected to both the urban core and each other by sustainable transit.”

What does this mean for planning policy? For a start it doesn’t mean replacing the green belt with carte blanche for piecemeal, build-what-you-will development. That would just add up to sprawl.

Further reading

Ten vested interests the Tories failed to tackle

By Peter Franklin

Achieving polycentric development will require direction – and, indeed, intervention – on the part of government to ensure density, good design and the provision of supporting infrastructure.

It also means biting whole chunks out of the green belt – but only where it prevents necessary development in strategic locations. If we’re truly serious about providing enough new homes without sprawl then we need to do things like build sustainable urban extensions to cities like Oxford or garden villages around rural railway stations – just the sort of smart development that our taboo-laden planning system currently makes impossible.

We urgently need an honest, open debate about how, where and when to make this happen.

With the normal business of government paused and the attention of the nation’s press undivided, the Conservative leadership contest might have been an opportunity to have that debate. In the process the candidates might have sent a message of hope to the younger voters without which the Party is finished.

But Messrs Johnson and Hunt obviously didn’t want to go for that.

If you Google the words “gentrification” and “excrement” (though mind how you go), news stories about the Golden City predominate. For instance, Forbes has an informative briefing on the issue by Adam Andrzejewski, CEO of OpenTheBooks.com. We learn that “since 2011 there have been at least 118,352 reported incidences of human fecal matter on [San Francisco] city streets”. A tastefully brown-coloured bar chart of “human feces incidents” shows that this is a growing problem – the bars get longer every year.

Last year, the San Francisco mayor created a “poop patrol” to literally clean up the city. Using payroll information, Open The Books estimate that each “human waste case” costs the taxpayer $32.75, not including “sunk costs” for steam cleaning equipment, etc.

Suggested reading

Down and out in the Golden State

By Peter Franklin

The fact that this, and the associated epidemics of homelessness, drug use and crime, is happening in one the most economically advanced and politically liberal cities in the world is an irony lost on no one.

As Karen Heller puts it in the Washington Post “everyone agrees that something has rotted in San Francisco”:

“Conservatives have long loathed it as the axis of liberal politics and political correctness, but now progressives are carping, too. They mourn it for what has been lost, a city that long welcomed everyone and has been altered by an earthquake of wealth.”

Erica Sandberg for the City Journal says that “many in law enforcement blame the crime wave on Proposition 47, which in 2014 downgraded possession of illegal narcotics for personal use and theft of anything under $950 in value from felonies to misdemeanors”. But clearly the impact of an out-of-control property market cannot be ignored. Farhad Manjoo quotes the key stats in a piece for the New York Times:

“One of every 11,600 residents is a billionaire, and the annual household income necessary to buy a median-priced home now tops $320,000.”

It’s not just the obvious consequences this has on homelessness, it’s also that runaway rental values are driving out the workers and businesses that a city needs to function as a community and flourish as a culture – especially a place like San Francisco whose character depends upon its diversity.

Karen Heller mentions the case of Lucca Ravioli – an Italian delicatessen that has closed its doors after 94 years; the land it stood on was sold off for millions to a developer.

Worse is yet to come. According to Alexis C Madrigal of The Atlantic “eight major tech companies” are expected to hold initial public offerings this year – all but one headquartered in San Francisco. That means a huge pay-out for the industry elite – who will, if the established pattern holds, pump a lot of that money into the local property market, driving prices even higher.

No wonder property turnover is so low in the city (“only 5,471 properties changed hands last year out of almost 400,000 units,” says Madrigal). Who wouldn’t hold on to an asset sat astride a river of gold?

Suggested reading

The cost of property may slowly kill Silicon Valley - but a Land Value Tax might give it new life

By Peter Franklin

Needless to say, San Francisco’s supposedly progressive politics is rotten with nimbyism. Farhad Manjoo points out the hypocrisy:

“Not-in-my-backyardism is a bipartisan sentiment, but because the largest American cities are populated and run by Democrats — many in states under complete Democratic control — this sort of nakedly exclusionary urban restrictionism is a particular shame of the left.”

Not that we can expect the Republicans to do much about the problem either – after all, there is a property developer in the White House. But perhaps the biggest failure is that of the tech industry. In one sense, they are the victims too – with landlords creaming off the value created by genuine entrepreneurs. One response is to join the landlord class. But those who still believe in generating wealth as opposed to extracting it should get up and leave.

Yes, there are reasons why particular industries cluster together in particular places. Proximity enables interaction and therefore creativity. But might there be a law of diminishing returns at work here? A point at which different perspectives become so bled into one another that they become indistinguishable?

Heller describes the “homogeneity” of the San Francisco knowledge class:

“Too expensive. Too tech. Too millennial. Too white. Too elite. Too bro.

“To take a midday tour downtown is to be enveloped by a jeaned and athleisured army of young workers, mostly white and Asian, and predominantly male. The presence of a boomer or toddler is akin to spotting an endangered species.”

There’s an argument that the tech industry, having changed the world is previous decades, is stagnating. Perhaps in hollowing out the things that made San Francisco special, big tech has done the same to itself.

Suggested reading

Is it all over for the big tech companies?

By Peter Franklin

America was built by pioneers who left over-crowded places to start afresh somewhere new. The tech ‘bros’ should get their get their shit together and do likewise.

Should modernist architects be involved in the rebuilding of Notre Dame? Yes, absolutely they should… they’d make fantastic gargoyles. After all, no one does ugly better.

If you walk through a city – almost any city – and fix your eyes on the nastiest building in your field of vision, it’s almost certainly in the modernist style. The most beautiful building, on the other hand, probably isn’t – more likely it’s some gutsy survivor from an early age.

Further reading

The violation of Salisbury, my ancient, gentle home

By Tom Holland

A word of warning, though: if you wish to maintain your cultural respectability, it is absolutely essential that you don’t say any of this out loud. If you must make a point about the deficiencies of the contemporary urban environment, then make sure that you blame the planners or motorists or just about anyone but the architects. After all, you wouldn’t want to end up like Sir Roger Scruton, would you?

The code of silence of the haute bourgeoisie has served the professions well, and the architects most of all. It’s why our politicians are so reluctant to talk about beauty – and why, when they occasionally do, they quickly lose their nerve. What the worship of ugliness can’t do, however, is make beautiful buildings disappear or stop the rest of us from gathering in their awesome presence. When our untutored eyes behold the greatness of Notre Dame and then flick to, say, the Pompidou Centre, the combined might of the cultural establishment cannot stop us from drawing the obvious conclusion.

Any other profession would be embarrassed to be overshadowed by the accomplishments of their forebears. Imagine if medical treatments had been more effective a hundred years ago? Today’s doctors would be mortified. Or what if the computers and mobile phones of the previous decade were considered to be faster and more fashionable than today’s gadgets? The alpha-geeks would blow a fuse.

Today’s architects, however, have to endure the general public’s enduring love – indeed, reverence – for buildings built centuries and sometimes millennia before the modern age. And it’s not as if this appreciation of old architecture is limited to its historical value. People will pay tens of thousands of pounds extra to live in a Victorian or Georgian house as opposed to contemporary dwelling. If Le Corbusier was right and a house really is just “a machine for living in”, then it seems that the architects of old built better machines than their 21st-century counterparts.

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That’s not to deny the very real advances in construction technology. Thanks to modern materials and computer assisted design, we can throw up buildings to unprecedented heights, with remarkable speed and in just about any shape that can be imagined – from the top-heavy mass of London’s Walkie Talkie to the pencil-thin towers now exalting the rich above Manhattan.

We can build just about anything we want and we’ve got much more money to do it with than in any other era of human history. Therefore this should be a golden age for modern architecture – but it’s not. Indeed, many within the profession believe that architects are being squeezed out of the design and development process (for instance, see here, here and here).

Ironically, they’ve become victims of the technology that made modernism possible in the first place. With the right software a developer can rustle up a workable, structurally sound blueprint for a major project without the need for an architect. The building or buildings may be supremely bland, but for a volume builder that’s a plus – by standardising the ‘design’ every aspect of the development, from finance to the planning process to the supply of building materials, can be streamlined and costs cut to the bone.

The result is a variation on the modernist style that I’ve seen described as ‘spreadsheet architecture’. I’m not sure who came up with the label, but it’s an apt one. For a start, the monotonous grid-like form of the buildings do look as if they’ve been designed on a spreadsheet application like Excel. The rows and columns might be resized or offset, but there’s not much else to break-up the monotony.

Further reading

The false promise of the vertical city

By Peter Franklin

You may have discerned I’m not the biggest fan of 20th-century architecture. Yet the other day I found myself staring at a piece of 1960’s brutalism with something like nostalgia. It was a hideous building, undistinguished even by modernist standards; but the squat concrete edifice still had a presence, bearing the mark of an intelligent, if misguided, designer. Spreadsheet architecture, on the other hand, looks exactly what you’d expect a computer to produce. Just type in a few parameters and off it goes: a plan for the maximum amount of rentable floor space with a minimum of thought for anything else you might want a building to be. Spreadsheet architecture clearly cares only about the bottom line – and if that can be done without paying an architect, so much the better.

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The core architectural modernist principle is “form follows function” – a phrase coined by Louis Sullivan, the so-called ‘father of the skyscraper’. When form does follow function as opposed to precedent, architects are free to break with tradition in the pursuit of other priorities.

Though presented as rational and progressive, this approach is in fact divisive and self-centred. Precedent and tradition are things shared across a community, but function is not. There is a literal and metaphorical difference in perspective between those on the inside of the building looking out and those on the outside looking towards it. The insiders are those least affected by the impact that the building has on everyone else. Functionalism – and its implicit disregard for beauty, balance and harmony – discounts the outsiders’ perspective.

Further reading

Ruskin's modern message

By Melanie McDonagh

Spreadsheet architecture is the ultimate expression of this mindset – and perfectly suited to the speculative development of our cities. As the primary function of all such development is to make money, its form must follow suit. It conforms to the needs of its most powerful users, i.e. investors who may never actually see the building with their own eyes. The radical uniformity of the design is just what a globalised property market demands – a fungible asset that is basically the same wherever one builds it.

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We’ve been conditioned not to resist or to imagine anything better: the architect knows best, we’re told; aesthetic judgements of the general public count for nothing. However, with the rise of spreadsheet architecture the issue has become disintermediated. The licensed taste-makers have been pushed aside and the clash of interests between the developer and the host community made plain for all to see. It’s time for the community to take back control. Local people must be equipped and empowered to set out a positive vision for the growth and development of their neighbourhoods – as opposed to exercising limited powers to block the worst proposals.

It can be done. The power of the developers can be systematically resisted. It already has been done with respect to conservation of culturally significant buildings and neighbourhoods. We’ve declared whole swathes of our cities off limits to the cold, commercial logic of the developers. Through the listed building system and conservation areas, we’ve decided that in many locations the old is more valuable than the new no matter how profitable it might be to redevelop it. Our ancestors would be amazed, because with a few exceptions – sacred buildings, monuments and the like – they happily tore down their old buildings confident that the new ones would be better. That we have lost this faith in the modern age is the most damning indictment of its architecture there could be.

Further reading

Why we must suppress technological progress

By Peter Franklin

But having defied the dragon of modernism to protect the best of the past, we need to do the same to achieve the best possible future. If developers aren’t allowed to wreck our historic neighbourhoods, then why should their short-term, selfish interests prevail in those locations where a city has the chance to reinvent itself? The opportunity for placemaking, to create streets, to bequeath the best of us to generations we’ll never meet, is simply too precious to waste on spreadsheet architecture.

Many attempts have been made to find a better yardstick. One of the best is the PwC-Demos Good Growth for Cities Index. Like GDP, it avoids subjective, hard-to-measure criteria like happiness; unlike GDP, it represents whether or not people can access the benefits of growth. For example, it takes into account factors including jobs, skills, income distribution, home ownership and housing affordability. Furthermore, the index , as the name suggests, is localised: it shows what’s going on in different parts of the country. Best of all, this is not a one-off exercise, but an ongoing project that started in the immediate wake of the global financial crisis.

Further reading

People not places: the real hope for a northern powerhouse

By Phillip Blond

The most recent report was published last year and covers the 2015-2017 period. The top three cities on the Good Growth Index were all in the South – Southampton, Reading and Oxford taking bronze, silver and gold. However the top three most improved cities (compared to the 2011-2013 period) were all in the North – Hull coming third, Middlesbrough-and-Stockton second and Preston in clear first place.

Writing for CityMetric, Neil McInroy and Jonty Leibowitz say that Preston has become “the poster child for an insurgent economic approach known as ‘local wealth building'” whose purpose is to “[rebuild] wealth from the bottom-up rather than the top-down”.

The core strategy is to develop “a dense local supply chain of local enterprises, employee-owned businesses, social enterprises [and] cooperatives” using the purchasing power of what are called “anchor institutions”,

“…such as housing organisations, universities, schools and hospitals. These institutions hold a unique position in the local economy, as they employ people, buy things, hold property and assets and are unlikely to relocate from the local area.”

An allied strategy is to increase “flows of investment within local economies by, for example, directing the funds from local authority pensions away from global markets and towards local schemes and community-owned banks and credit unions.”

Further reading

Westminster's broken: To rescue our British parliament, establish an English parliament

By Peter Franklin

As reported in The Economist, this has made a significant difference to the amount of money being spent locally:

“The Centre for Local Economic Strategies, a Manchester-based think-tank, audited the spending of six such institutions last month and found that they spent 18% of their most recent year’s budget in Preston, compared with 5% in 2013. In cash terms, this meant an extra £75m being spent in the city—around £530 per citizen. The share of their spending in Lancashire doubled from 39% to 79%. It required no extra money nor new legislation.”

The Economist describes Preston as “Jeremy Corbyn’s model town”. Preston City Council is Labour controlled – as is Manchester City Council, which pioneered the local wealth building approach together with the Centre for Local Economic Strategies (CLES). Nationally, the Labour Party has established a Community Wealth Building Unit.

Messrs McInroy and Leibowitz, who both work for CLES, use Left-wing language in praise of the Preston model, claiming that “it slays the neoliberal dragon of trickle down economics”. Fans of the “neoliberal dragon” would no doubt protest that trickledown economics is a bogeyman of the Left’s invention – and nothing to do with them. However, I doubt they’d think much of the Preston model either – regarding it as a Lancastrian version of Juche (the North Korean doctrine of self-sufficiency). 

Narrowly interpreted, a market-based approach would require public institutions to spend our money sparingly and guided by the price mechanism alone – anything else, like trying to grow a local economy through parochial preference, would undermine market discipline and lead to inefficiency.

Except that local councils and other public institutions have an interest not only in how little they pay for something, but how much they get in return. That, of course, includes the quantity and quality of the purchase itself, but also wider benefits to local jobs, skills and investment – things which eventually flow back to the council in the form of local tax revenues and reduced demand on the local public sector. The council might get a better upfront price from, say, a London-based company, but if the money flows away into distant coffers, then it does nothing more for the community.

Free marketeers ascribe the global decline in poverty to the wealth-generating powers of capitalism – and not without reason. And yet while the countries that account for the bulk of this progress (above all, China) have moved in a capitalist direction, they’ve also been careful to trade on terms that achieve strategic objectives such as building up the strength of homegrown industries. Private enterprises and individuals in the West also make purchasing decisions on non-price criteria; the long-term strategic value of a close relationship with a particular set of suppliers and customers often counts for more than a short-term financial saving.

It seems odd that the public sector alone – and especially the local public sector – should be robotically required to accept the lowest bid irrespective of other considerations.

Fortunately, the 2012 Public Services (Social Value) Act empowers councils and other public sector institutions to take into account the wider economic, social and environmental value of their purchasing decisions. It was a Conservative MP, Chris White, who introduced the legislation as a private members bill – securing the support of the Conservative-led Coalition government. Moreover, it was the Coalition that pursued a broader programme of decentralisation – giving towns and cities more control over their future development than they’ve had for decades.

Further reading

What's the point of central government?

By Peter Franklin

I’m not saying the Conservatives should claim credit for the Preston model – after all, the whole point of decentralisation is that the key decisions should be made, and be seen to be made, locally.

However, Theresa May’s government should have been a more vocal champion of this agenda – striving to find new ways to support it. To have allowed local economic empowerment to become associated with Corbynism is yet another example of this government’s political ineptitude – and yet another failure to understand what ‘taking back control’ actually means.

The burden of ministerial office is a heavy one – quite literally, because those red briefcases they carry around are lined with lead.

That might seem like overkill for a bit of paperwork, but the 19th century design intended that the ‘boxes’, as they’re referred to, should sink if lost overboard on an overseas visit. Any state secrets contained therein would thus be safely consigned to the depths.

The boxes, which cost the best part of a grand, are just as weighty today as they used to be. This might suggest that the documents they carry are of the utmost national importance. But while some of them are, others really aren’t.

A lot of them concern matters that central government shouldn’t be involved in at all – decisions of purely local significance and about relatively small sums of public money. There’s nothing wrong with looking after the pennies, of course – but it’s best to do it where you can see them being spent, which isn’t from a desk in Whitehall.

Nevertheless, choices that should be the business of people and places hundreds of miles away are made late into the night by Secretaries of State who have enough to worry about already.

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The idea that power is over-centralised in this country is hardly an original one. It’s been a recurring theme of public debate for 20 years or more. These days everyone is a ‘localist’; no one claims to be a centralist. And yet the centralised micro-management of local matters continues day-in, day-out.

Suggested reading

June 23rd – an anniversary for George Osborne to celebrate!

By Peter Franklin

David Cameron’s ‘Big Society’ was supposed to put that right. And up to a point, it did. Through the groundbreaking City Deals programme – followed by the Growth Deals and Devolution Deals – more was done to decentralise power from London to England’s other cities than by all the other governments since the war put together.

It was an object lesson in good policy design. A named minister was put in charge and left in charge. He was supported by a small and dedicated team that was allowed to recruit from outside the civil service. And best of all, the process of decentralisation was itself decentralised. Instead of Whitehall unilaterally deciding on a one-size-fits-all, take-it-or-leave-it package of devolved powers for all the cities, each city was allowed to negotiate its own bespoke deal.

By 2017 metropolitan areas across the nation had their own elected ‘metro mayors’ and combined authorities capable of directing millions, even billions, of pounds of investment. It went down well in the cities themselves, especially in the North of England which really took to the idea of the ‘Northern Powerhouse’.

So what did Theresa May do with this legacy when she became Prime Minister? She dropped the ball, of course. Despite promising “an economy that works for everyone” she forgot that means empowering every part of the country to take back control of its own economic development.

And, no, Brexit is not an excuse. People did not vote to repatriate power from Brussels only for it to get stuck in London.

Suggested reading

Could Brexit fix our broken politics?

By Giles Fraser

A key moment came last year, when the introduction of a substantially revised railway timetable was botched so badly that services were disrupted for weeks. The North of England was one of the worst affected areas. Transport for the North – an agency formed to give Northerners as much control over transport as Transport for London gives to Londoners – should have led the response. Yet the fiasco demonstrated that the strategic decisions were still being made in London – ultimately by Chris Grayling’s Department for Transport.

And that’s the trouble with managing decentralisation from Whitehall. No matter how well designed the deal-making process, it ultimately depends on the continued approval and, even worse, the continued attention of a tiny circle of decision-makers in Downing Street.

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It’s time to rethink localism. The real question isn’t ‘can local communities be trusted with more power?’ but ‘can central government be trusted to decentralise it?’ As the answer to that is obviously ‘no’ – here’s my modest proposal:

Instead of seeing what further powers might be prized from the grip of Whitehall and Westminster, let’s start from the position that our cities and shires should run absolutely everything. Yes, everything. So, no national taxes, only local taxes. No NHS, but Local Health Services. There’d be local security services too and local armies, local navies (in coastal counties anyway) and local nuclear deterrents (councils with ‘nuclear-free zones’ would have the option of unilaterally disarming themselves).

More from this author

Time to scrap these toxic parties

By Polly Mackenzie

Have I gone completely mad? Quite possibly, but the point I’m making is than in allocating powers between different levels of government the burden of proof should be reversed: it should be for central government to convince local communities that it is best placed to take the lead on a particular issue – not the other way round. For instance, I dare say that most areas of the country would be willing to surrender their nukes to the Ministry of Defence (though Yorkshire and Essex may have other ideas). They probably wouldn’t want the bother of running their own currencies either – apart from Brighton-and-Hove, of course, where they could experiment with making pebbles legal tender.

Nevertheless, with all of the money and power, the cities and shires would be free to pool their resources in other ways. They could form local partnerships with one another and empower regional agencies. Or they could they could get really creative and do things like revive the Council of the North or set-up an English Parliament.

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With new power structures emerging from the bottom-up, central government would do only what couldn’t be done more locally. It would therefore be much smaller than it is now. Grover Norquist, an advocate of low taxes in the US, said: “I don’t want to abolish government, I simply want to reduce it to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub.” Well, one doesn’t have to go that far. This is all about sharing-out, not shrinking, the state.

Still, taking an axe to Whitehall would be fun. Entire departments would be abolished and amalgamated. For instance, with different parts of the country sorting out their own local infrastructure investments, you’d only need Whitehall to do the national stuff – which, once we’d slaughtered white elephants like HS2, Heathrow expansion and nuclear new build, wouldn’t be much. We could could join-up transport, energy, communications, water and housing into a single department instead of the five we’ve got doing the job now.

Suggested reading

Bring on the People's Peers

By Richard Askwith

With fewer government departments doing fewer things we’d need fewer ministers and fewer MPs. In 2010, David Cameron promised to reduce the number of MPs from 650 to 600. It was a modest cut, but so far the Commons has wriggled out of it. Well, they’ve had their chance. After the shambles they’ve made of Brexit, radical surgery is required. America, a federal nation of 325 million people, has a lower house of 435 members. So, on a pro rata basis, a federalised UK would need 87 MPs. And seeing how the world’s most powerful nation gets by with just 100 Senators, we could cut down the House of Lords from 781 to, er, 20.

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How much mischief could 107 Parliamentarians get up to? Quite a lot, actually, so we’d also need local government to write us a new constitution. The status quo, in which Parliament assumes that it has a monopoly on power – to be localised only at its discretion – cannot be allowed to stand. We need to look at the example of countries like Germany, Switzerland and the USA, whose written constitutions spell out that power resides at different levels of government, not just at the centre.

Unfortunately, we have to start from where we are. For radical localisation to happen, Parliament has to agree to it. So, on the principle that turkeys don’t vote for Christmas, what hope can there be of change?

None at all – unless, of course, we stop voting for turkeys.

Click here to read our series of answers to the question: how can we fix our democracy?

Suggested reading

Down and out in the Golden State

By Peter Franklin

In this decade, there’s been a modest but steady rise in German house prices. This might be a reaction to the Eurozone crisis, with investors looking for a safe haven for their money: it doesn’t get much safer than Germany’s unexciting property market.

In Berlin, however, things have been hotting up. By rights, the capital of Europe’s biggest economy ought to be a global metropolis like London or New York – with ridiculous rental values to match. However, Berlin’s history set it on a different path. Thankfully, the 21st century has been less traumatic than the 20th, and the city quietly gained a reputation for affordable urban cool.

Needless to say, it couldn’t last – not the affordability bit, anyway. According to an article by Joanna Kusiak for The Conversation, the housing market is up sharply – with a 20.5% increase in 2017 alone. Renters are paying the price:

“As demand for housing in Berlin has grown over the past 15 years, rents have been driven up to the point that – according to a recent study – 40% of Berliners aged between 45 and 55 are unlikely to be able to afford to stay in the city after they retire. Unless housing is socialised, that is.”

The city does have rent controls – a system known as the Mietspiegel or ‘rent mirror’. Basically, it’s an index of rent levels over recent years that serves as a guide to what a fair rent should be for properties, according to type and location. In other words, a very German system of consensus-building through established precedent.

But in Berlin the constraints are breaking down. Large-scale private landlords, owning tens of thousands of flats, have such an outsize influence that they can shift the Mietspiegel firmly in their favour.

This has provoked a campaign to use an obscure clause in the German constitution to renationalise the property through compulsory purchase:

“If successful, the move could provide a legal precedent for other cities to call for nationalisaton as a modern and legitimate solution to their housing crises. It could also prompt changes to international law, empowering legislation initiatives that see housing as a human right, as a strategic resource or as global commons.”

Suggested reading

The rise and rise of Open and Closed

By Peter Franklin

This attempt to ‘take back control’ fits the great political pattern of our time – the struggle between global frameworks and local democracy (or ‘open versus closed’ to use the biased language of the globalisers):

“Berlin’s housing corporations are active on the international stock market, and taking their property would lead the city government into a confrontation with international law which, in general, strongly protects corporate private property.”

Therefore, I’d be very surprised if the local campaigners win a legal battle – especially if they want to use the compulsory purchase powers to pay less than the inflated market values of the properties concerned.

A better way forward would be to use the tax system. If property prices go up by a fifth in one year, it’s not because the buildings suddenly got 20% bigger – it’s because the land on which they’re built got more valuable. All the landlord has to do is sit on his land and count the profit. The answer is to tax this unearned wealth – at a significantly higher rate than taxes on earned income and returns from genuine entrepreneurship.

Of course, heavy taxation disincentivises work and investment. With a land value tax, though, it is speculation that is disincentivised. However, if private landlords can’t make a profit from rising land values, they may decide that managing the buildings isn’t worth the bother. So, what if they decide to sell up and walk away?

Well, in that case the housing reformers of Berlin will get what they want – they can buy the offloaded stock at a reasonable price and transfer it to social ownership. There are many different models – including council housing, housing associations, housing cooperatives and community land trusts. Try them all and see what works best where.

Suggested reading

How to introduce a Land Value Tax tactfully

By Peter Franklin

Nationalising – or, rather, socialising – housing stock would appear to be a defeat for the free market: the frontiers of the state rolling forwards instead of back. Certainly, such a move could be seen as ‘crowding out’ private investment and thus a vital source of the innovation and entrepreneurship on which wealth creation depends. Land, however, is not like other kinds of wealth. On any economically relevant timescale and in any normal circumstances, it can be neither created nor destroyed.

Rent, therefore, is not a reward for wealth creation, but rather an overhead that wealth creators have to pay. The lower the rent the more efficient the market.

The problem isn’t that they’ve got the vote – rather it’s that they’ve been manipulated by fake news and social media into voting the wrong way. Whereas once they were guided by the gentle voices of their intellectual betters, the hoi polloi now decide for themselves where they get their information from. As a result they’ve self-segregated into their chosen echo chambers – emerging only to batter each other senseless on Twitter and Facebook.

Suggested reading

Don’t believe what those idiots are telling you about echo chambers

By Peter Franklin

It’s not really their fault, of course. These poor, weak-willed creatures just can’t help themselves. It’s therefore up to those of us with the privilege of a good education and a sophisticated outlook on life to intervene before our respective nations tear themselves apart.

Well, that’s one narrative – but does it stand up to scrutiny? In an eye-opening piece for The Atlantic, Amanda Ripley, Rekha Tenjarla and Angela Y He, look at the evidence (from a US perspective).

There’s not much doubt that America is more politically polarised than it used to be:

“We know that Americans have become more biased against one another based on partisan affiliation over the past several decades. Most of us now discriminate against members of the other political side explicitly and implicitly—in hiring, dating, and marriage, as well as judgments of patriotism, compassion, and even physical attractiveness, according to recent research.”

This is sad – but is it equally true of all Americans? The Atlantic commissioned research to find out:

“The survey asked how people would feel if a close family member married a Republican or a Democrat; how well they think the terms selfish, compassionate, or patriotic describe Democrats versus Republicans; and other questions designed to capture sentiments about political differences.”

The results may confound expectations:

“In general, the most politically intolerant Americans, according to the analysis, tend to be whiter, more highly educated, older, more urban, and more partisan themselves.”

Of course, it’s no surprise that the most politically partisan individuals are the most politically prejudiced. However, the fact that such prejudice is associated with higher levels of education is counter-intuitive. One would expect intolerance and ignorance to go together.

Suggested reading

The most dangerous thing about meritocracy

By Peter Franklin

Perhaps we need to distinguish between the ignorance of not knowing certain facts and the ignorance of not knowing people who are different from you and yours:

“…according to decades of research into how prejudice operates, humans are more likely to discriminate against groups of people with whom they do not have regular, positive interactions.”

If this is all about interaction, then why aren’t urban areas havens of tolerance? Isn’t the whole point of a city to bring people together? It should be, but the size and diversity of a city population increases the scope for people to pick and choose who they associate with (the real point of city living, a cynic might say). While this facilitates creative specialisation, it also facilitates social separation. Moreover, it’s reasonable to assume that the highly qualified will be those most likely to work in rarefied professional environments and to live in exclusive neighbourhoods.

Viewed in this light, the findings of the survey aren’t so unexpected. If older, more educated, urban-dwelling, white Americans are the least likely to practice political tolerance, it’s because they don’t have to – they can afford a better class of bubble.

If one assumes a correlation between education and knowledge, one might hope that the alienating effects of exclusivity would be moderated by possession of the facts. Unfortunately, knowing more about an issue doesn’t make people more open-minded to evidence that contradicts their beliefs – quite the opposite in fact. There’s also research that shows that exposure to the arguments of the ‘other side’ leads people to harden their own opinions.

Suggested reading

When eggheads are bigger idiots than meatheads

By Peter Franklin

In other words, the ‘bubbles’ that incubate political prejudice are not bubbles of fact and opinion, but of trust.

Clearly, we need to overcome these barriers – and not just to lessen the negative effects of political polarisation. There’s a growing body of evidence that, in the right circumstances, viewpoint diversity can be a positively good thing. When people of widely differing opinions are not only willing to tolerate one another, but to actively cooperate, they can achieve more than teams who share the same middle-of-the-road opinions.

Viewpoint diversity is one of the things we try to achieve at UnHerd. You, of course, may disagree.

Bicycles!

Suddenly, they were all over the place – in noticeably greater numbers than before. The ‘bike boxes’ (or advanced stop lines) at traffic lights are often brim-full of cyclists, shiny and raring-to-go, like netted fish in a well-stocked river.

What explains this surge? It’s not as if a congested city like London is the most cycle-friendly place in the world. On the other hand, the congestion is what makes cycling a quicker option. Furthermore, the provision of cycle lanes, bike boxes and public hire schemes hasn’t just improved safety and convenience, it’s also shifted social norms – signalling that London’s roads are not exclusive to the internal combustion engine.

Suggested reading

Left behind – life beyond the London bubble

By James Bloodworth

Perhaps, the ultimate driver (if that’s the right word) is economic. It’s now so expensive to live and work in London and other global cities that savings have to found somewhere; for many people that means swapping cars, bus passes and gym memberships for a bike. So, if you don’t like cyclists, then blame city landlords.

And, yes, there has been a backlash against the urban cyclist. In any walk of life, and any mode of transport, a given percentage of our fellow human beings behave badly and/or idiotically. Cycling is not immune.

We’ve all got our stories. Mine include the MAMIL (Middle Aged Man In Lycra) who ran a red light almost hitting me at a pedestrian crossing. When I pointed this out, he responded with some travel advice of his own. Another near miss was with a younger cyclist who came whizzing round a corner, only to complain that I was in the “middle of the road”. I was, but that’s an inevitable part of crossing one.

Pedestrians can be idiots too, of course, especially the kind fixated on their smartphones not the street. And most dangerous of all are those in motorised vehicles – not because they’re worse people, but because they’re driving a ton or more of high-speed metal.

So, mindful of the toll of death and injury suffered by cyclists, let’s try to be tolerant – and careful. It might also help to think about the ways in which we all benefit from more cycling. Consider the following from Carlton Reid of Forbes:

“New research from Transport for London (TfL) claims that people walking, cycling and using public transport spend more than motorists in local shops. Conducted by Matthew Carmona from University College London’s Bartlett School of Planning, the research reveals that those not in cars spend 40% more each month than motorists.”

Suggested reading

Our 'open' society has shut the door on shared spaces

By Peter Franklin

The rise of online retail is often blamed for the decline of the high street – and not without reason. However, the policy response should be as much about real space as cyberspace. Shops, pubs and restaurants haven’t got a chance if they occupy environments that people want to get out of as soon as possible.

That can change. Making the urban environment friendly for cycling and walking – or ‘active transport’ to use the latest policy speak – makes it more pleasant for shopping too (and other uses of shared space):

“The research was conducted in areas of London which have benefitted from Dutch-style streetscape improvements, such as the addition of cycleways…

“In those areas improved – such as the mini-Holland redesign in the suburb of Walthamstow, ten miles north of Westminster – the number of people walking in the streets increased by 93%.

“People also spent more time in the street, with a 216% increase in activity such as going into shops and cafés.

“Thanks to the increased – and improved – footfall, retail rental values increased by 7.5% and there was a 17% decline in retail vacancies.”

Of course, there are trade-offs. More space for cyclists can mean less for motorists – especially in city centres where there’s the least room to play with.

But do we really want to prioritise the speed with which we can get in, out and through our cities? This would seem to miss the point of what a city is for.

Suggested reading

The false promise of the vertical city

By Peter Franklin

Actually, yes. You can go one rung lower on the ladder of cool – to the abode of the bus enthusiast.

While a wisp of steam age romance still clings to the train, the poor old bus has nothing at all in the way of glamour. To be compared to the back end of one is to be cruelly insulted.

Margaret Thatcher is supposed to have said that “a man who, beyond the age of 26, finds himself on a bus can count himself a failure”. In fact, there’s no evidence that she uttered any such thing. But filtering the sentiment through a caricature of Thatcher is a safe way of expressing prejudices about people who use buses – clearly, it is thought, they have no other choice. Even the humble cyclist cuts a more dynamic figure these days.

And yet if there’s one form of transport set to transform our cities it’s the bus. I’ve previously made the case for why automated buses might go mainstream long before driverless cars, but that’s not the only transformative tech at stake.

More from this series

How driverless cars could make streets safer

By Peter Franklin

Electric vehicles have many advantages over gas guzzlers – not least in drastically cutting back on carbon emissions and local air pollution.

With battery electric cars already on our roads, it might be assumed that lighter vehicles will go electric long before heavier ones. But, according to Michael Liebreich, in a must-read for Bloomberg New Energy Finance, that’s not necessarily the case:

“Buses, which were under the radar in 2016, have started going electric faster than light-duty vehicles. There are nearly 400,000 electric buses on the road already, 99 percent of them in China; BNEF expects electric buses to have a lower total cost of ownership in almost all charging configurations by 2019. By 2030, it expects 84 percent of all municipal bus sales globally to be electric, and by 2040, some 80 percent of the global municipal bus fleet will be electric.”

Buses, because they travel predictable routes aren’t subject to the same ‘range anxiety‘ as privately-owned battery-powered vehicles. Furthermore, bus fleets share depots, where charging infrastructure and the specialist servicing of electrical drive systems can be more easily deployed. Then there’s the economics:

“…if an electric car can compete with internal combustion on a total cost-of-ownership (TCoE) basis for a given route pattern, an electric bus or truck will too. And since bus and truck purchasers are driven almost entirely by TCoE, not sticker price or branding, once break-even is achieved, the switch to electric will be as fast as the supply chain and charging infrastructure will allow.”

The availability of affordable non-polluting vehicles will embolden policy-makers to slap heavier penalties on dirty vehicles – thus accentuating the the economic advantages of the new tech.

For a whole range of reasons, electric vehicles will be easier to automate than fossil fuelled ones – not least because EVs have fewer moving parts. The automation of electric buses would take out another big chunk of the operating costs: the bus driver. The drivers’ loss would be the passengers’ gain, making bus travel even more attractive – even to the extent of ending the need (if not the desire) for urban motoring.

As Liebreich points out, the special advantages of electrifying buses also applies to other heavy vehicles – especially those owned and operated in fleets within urban areas. In short, the potential will soon exist for an urban transport revolution.

More from this series

Trump, truckers and the automation paradox: robots could lead to labour shortages

By Peter Franklin

So here’s a prediction: At some point in the next decade, a mainstream mayoral candidate for a major city will stand on a platform of phasing out all non-electric vehicles – and, moreover, almost all cars of any type.

This will be controversial to say the least. But the candidate will be able to promise a radically transformed city: cheaper mobility, no congestion, quieter and safer streets, and massively reduced air pollution.

On the other hand, city dwellers will lose the right to drive.

It will be a hugely consequential and deeply divisive choice – but, sometimes, that’s what democracy is for.

Air-conditioning is what enabled this astonishing rate of growth, along with the wider shift in the US population toward the South and Southwest.

Further reading

Why air-conditioning is making us hotter

By Peter Franklin

But as Oliver Millman explains in the Guardian, there are limits to what air-con can achieve:

“Last summer, Phoenix was so hot that road signs and mailboxes melted. Planes couldn’t take off or land.”

Air-con provides a refuge, but as temperatures climb and summers lengthen, life in the Sun Belt can feel like a siege:

“It will get worse – Phoenix, the fastest-warming large city in the US, could spend close to half of its year in over 100F (37C) heat within 30 years.

“‘If you choose to live in the desert you have to learn how to live in the desert,’ [Amanda] Ormond [a local resident] said. ‘You worry about your car breaking down and so you have tons of food and water in it.

“‘But the heat used to break around September. Now, it’s October, sometimes November. We literally have six months of above 90F (32C). Mentally, you need a break. You can’t leave your house. It’s fatiguing.’”

Millman describes a new nationwide trend of “climate gentrification” – in which the well-to-do acquire property at higher elevations – either to escape the heat or, in vulnerable areas, the risk of flooding.

Further reading

Geoengineering: another fine mess not to get into

By Peter Franklin

In Arizona, that’s resulted in growing demand for homes (including holiday homes) in communities like Flagstaff (population: 70,000 souls, elevation: 7,000 feet):

“On a recent July day this year, when Phoenix hit 116F (47C), Flagstaff, a two-hour drive and a world away, was 80F (27C).”

But what about those who can’t afford to buy ‘elevation privilege’? They’ll either have to stay behind and sweat it out – or move out of the region altogether.

Climate change is already happening and we have no choice but to adapt to the warming that’s locked-in. However, there is a choice to be made between preventing further climate change and adapting to a hotter planet.

There are those who claim that the latter approach is more cost-effective. The argument is that prevention is an immediate and ongoing cost, but that adaptation can wait until climate change properly kicks in – by which time the global economy will be much bigger and the necessary spending that much more affordable. Those who suffer the worst impacts of climate change could be compensated from the proceeds of all that unrestricted growth.

Well, that’s the theory and it’s full of holes: the dubious economic assumptions; the impossibility of managing the ‘tail risks‘ of unmitigated climate change; the other costs of not kicking our addiction to fossil fuels. However, the biggest problem with the adaptation-only argument is a moral one. 

In Christian theology, the concept of ‘common grace’ refers to the blessings that God confers upon all of humanity, without condition. As it says in the Gospel of Matthew: “He makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the just and on the unjust.”

Whether within a religious framework or not, this is how we should see the blessing of a stable climate – as a form of common grace. It is there for the benefit of all – whether rich or poor, powerful or powerless.

To choose to take it away from anyone is not only an act of theft (for which ‘economic efficiency’ is never a defence), it also renders the poor and powerless dependent on the pity of the rich and powerful – making them beggars in their own homes.

Further reading

Decarbonising the economy: now for the hard bit

By Peter Franklin

When I was writing the piece I wondered whether there was a British parallel. London of course has extremes of wealth and poverty, but they’re stirred up together .

Further reading

The brutal apartheid of the French banlieues

By Peter Franklin

However, looking North for CityMetric, Sam Gregory argues that Sheffield is not one city but two:

“Sheffield A is a healthy, wealthy and leafy mix of greens, golf courses and gastropubs stretching from Fulwood and Ranmoor in the west to Nether Edge, Meersbrook and Dore in the south. This is the city that made international headlines in recent months with a campaign to protect its street trees from an incompetent and complacent council.

“Sheffield B is an adjacent but almost entirely unconnected city running down the Don from Upperthorpe to Hillsborough, up to Ecclesfield in the north and stretching to Tinsley, Attercliffe, Darnall and Gleadless Valley in the east. It is a place economically characterised by poverty, lack of opportunity, low-skilled work, poor quality housing stock and even poorer public transport.”

The west/south versus east/north split is remarkably similar to that of Paris, but Gregory draws a striking parallel with another European city:

“Uniquely for a British city, where pockets of deprivation are usually nestled uncomfortably between well-to-do suburbs, Sheffield’s dividing line runs directly through the city like the Berlin Wall. How did this happen?”

As it happens, I lived in Sheffield for three years as a student – so its Paris-like social geography should have occurred to me before.

The reason it didn’t is a telling one: almost all the students lived and studied and amused themselves in Sheffield A (though there may have been changes since my time). The politics and culture of the university was decidedly leftwing, albeit in a middle-class-but-pretending-not-to-be kind of way. The instinctively Labour but culturally conservative politics of much of working-class Sheffield was the one variety of leftism with no voice on campus. Indeed, there was very little about Sheffield B that impinged upon our solipsistic little world.

Sheffield is obviously a much smaller city than Paris, London or Berlin. You can travel from Sheffields A to B readily enough. Yet there are other kinds of distance. Gregory describes neighbourhoods along a bus route across the city where “average life expectancy falls by 7.5 years for men and almost 10 years for women”.

How did the city come to be so divided?

“The wealthier half, much of it dating from the turn-of-the-century, represents the flight of the managers and mill owners from the noise and smog of Blake’s ‘dark satanic mills’. The rich ensconced themselves in an enclave high above their employees, literally: Sheffield A is significantly hilly, particularly the parts that border the Peak District to the west. The spacious Victorian houses often feature spectacular views across the seven hills.”

This west-versus-east pattern can be seen in many cities with a long history – and is partly explained by prevailing wind patterns and their contribution to air quality. It could be that this general factor combined with Sheffield’s particular topography to produce an especially strong geographical gradient of social separation.

However, as in Paris, architecture and urban design has also had an impact. The traditional streets and dwellings of Sheffield A, while by no means uniformly luxurious – are attractive, adaptable and loved by their residents. They are organically self-sustaining.

Non-traditional architecture, especially that purpose-built for social housing (like Sheffield’s brutalist Park Hill estate) is very different. It comes into existence through top-down initiative and can only be sustained in the same fashion. In more than one sense of the word, it keeps its residents structurally dependent upon those with power.

Further reading

"Sneckdowns" and desire lines: A parable for the big data age

By Peter Franklin

In her recent speech to National Housing Federation, Theresa May said something surprisingly profound about social housing:

“Whether unintentionally or by design, the decisions we make about the homes we build for social rent – their location, quality and appearance – can all too easily make them distinct from the community in which they stand.

“This, in turn, can cement prejudice and stigma among those who live in them and wider society, leading to lowered expectations and restricted opportunities.

“It shouldn’t be this way.”

That’s right, it shouldn’t. But when one looks at the evolution of our cities, whether bigger ones like Paris or smaller ones like Sheffield, what stands out is that successful, sustainable patterns of development take hold when residents have genuine control and agency over the places they live in.

Politicians must therefore close their ears to the theories of fashionable architects (and their pockets to the donations of wealthy developers). The key to true regeneration is to give everyone the same chance to shape their own space.

Meanwhile, in a church hall in London, a senior British politician is taking questions from an audience. A woman stands up and asks him about the nightly violence in France – but instead of referring to ‘suburbs’, she uses the French word banlieues.

To this day I’m not sure whether he couldn’t hear her properly or whether he had no idea what a banlieue was; but, for whatever reason, he didn’t understand the question. So he asked her to repeat it. She did so, using exactly the same phrasing. Again he didn’t understand – and again he asked her to repeat the question. It wasn’t third time lucky. He still didn’t understand and apologetically moved on to someone else.

It was acutely embarrassing for all concerned – and yet the questioner was right to use the word she did. Banlieue means, and explains, so much more than ‘suburb’.

Further reading

Flyover France – the forgotten frontier

By Peter Franklin

London has suburbs, but they are integral parts of the overall city. Paris is different. Officially, the city consists of its 20 arrondissements (boroughs) and that’s it. The built up areas beyond these limits are both Paris and not-Paris – part of the conurbation, but not part the city.

Administratively, the suburbs are hived off from central Paris into a ring of three different départements (counties). Thus while the mayor of London represents 8.8 million people, the mayor of Paris represents just 2.2 million – despite the two conurbations being the same size.

So that’s the second meaning of banlieue: not so much a suburb as a satellite community – physically attached to, but politically separate from, the city centre.

But that’s not the only division at work. Paris was where “liberté, fraternité, egalité” was first proclaimed. But richer Parisians have taken advantage of their liberté to live as far as possible from their fellow citizens. There’s a distinct geographical pattern to this. Whether in the centre or the suburbs, the richest neighbourhoods are generally to the west. This is an old phenomenon and not limited to Paris or France. Basically, it’s to do with prevailing winds and air quality – the stench of a medieval city and the pollution of a modern metropolis aren’t so bad if you can afford to live upwind.

In the post-war period, it got worse – not the smell, but the geographical inequality. As in many other countries, the effort to build new housing was led by the state. But unlike, say, London where, social housing is spread throughout the capital, the Parisian approach was build on the outskirts.

In part this was because of where the available land was – Paris having been spared the bomb damage suffered by London. However, the scope for large scale development also gave the French planners a chance to implement the theories of modernist architects such as Le Corbusier.

Further reading

Fascism, architecture and Donald Trump

By Peter Franklin

In the 1920s, the Godfather of Brutalism drew up a plan to flatten a stretch of downtown Paris and replace it with a grid featuring 18 identical concrete towers. Thankfully, that never happened. After the war, however, modernism was unleashed on those powerless to resist. And thus we come to the third meaning of banlieue – a specific reference to the vast ‘concretopias’ constructed around the edges of Paris and other cities in the 50s, 60s and 70s .

At the heart of each of these banlieues, is the cité – an inward facing cluster of dehumanising, brutalist tower blocks. Following modernist dogma, the new neighbourhoods were heavily zoned: the residential, commercial and other functions of the community built as separate centres, instead of evolving together organically as they do in a traditional mixed-use neighbourhood. In theory – and modernism is all about the theory – the different centres were to be linked together by bus. In practice, the links were inadequate, as were those from the banlieues into central Paris.

The first inhabitants left as soon as they could and they were replaced by people with no other option. From the 1960s onwards, that has increasingly meant immigrants, especially those from France’s former colonies in North Africa. Thus to the geographical, social, economic and architectural segregation of greater Paris – ethnic and religious divisions were added too.

Further reading

Can there ever be racial harmony in France?

By John Lichfield

It’s hard to think of a worse physical context for the successful integration of millions of incomers. The banlieues may as well have been designed as ghettoes.

Of course, other cities also have their cultural enclaves. London is certainly no exception – with its various ethnically and socio-economically distinctive neighbourhoods. Geographically, however, these are small enough, and sufficiently jumbled up, to encourage at least some mixing. That doesn’t mean that London is like a Benetton catalogue come to life, but its internal geography does limit the extent of segregation.

Some parts of Greater Paris are also like this. The south-eastern suburbs include deprived areas, but also wealthier neighbourhoods next to green spaces like the Bois de Vincennes. The north-east, however, is utterly dominated by the concrete banlieues. Administratively, they are grouped together within Seine-Saint-Denis – one of the poorest départements in France, which is sat next to, but a world away from, the richest. A 2014 map of the 1,500 poorest neighbourhoods in France illustrates the starkness of the economic divide.

What we don’t have, however, is a map of the ethnic and religious divide – because in France the state is legally prohibited from collecting statistics on the basis of ethnic or religious identity. In theory (there’s that word again), everyone is equal and being French is all that matters. The reality, however, is one of segregation along racial lines.

In 2015, the French Prime Minister, Manuel Valls, admitted as much. Marking the tenth anniversary of the 2005 riots he said that there was “territorial, ethnic and social apartheid” in France. He might have added that nowhere is that apartheid more obvious than between the citadel of power and its immediate neighbour.

Of course, nobody intended the banlieues to turn out the way that they did – and yet everything that has happened is the direct result of the deliberate actions of an arrogant and out-of-touch elite.

Perhaps they should all be sent to live there.

Earlier this year, a self-driving vehicle hit and killed a pedestrian in Tempe, Arizona. There was a back-up driver in the driving seat, but the car – part of a testing programme – was in autonomous mode at the time.

It was a tragic demonstration of the current limitations of the technology. Writing for Bloomberg, Jeremy Khan says that timelines for the development and commercialisation of AV (autonomous vehicle) technology are slipping – as the full complexities of coping with an unpredictable driving environment become clear.

But what if the driving environment could be simplified? Khan focuses on comments made by Andrew Ng – a leading figure in the industry:

“‘What we tell people is, ‘Please be lawful and please be considerate,’’ says Andrew Ng, a well-known machine learning researcher who runs a venture fund that invests in AI-enabled companies, including self-driving startup Drive.AI. In other words: no jaywalking.’”

Certainly, it would be easier for the AV algorithms to identify pedestrians if they only crossed the road at designated and clearly marked crossings. But why should pedestrians modify their behaviour to make life easier for the AV developers?

Suggested reading

Self-driving cars are a chance to rehumanise our streets

By Peter Franklin

Pedestrians have had to make allowances for other, more dangerous forms of traffic ever since the taming of the horse. In the modern era, we’ve been slaughtered in our millions by the non-driverless car and even the bicycle is a growing menace (though a rarely fatal one). So, what’s one more reason to mind our step?

“Ng argues that humans have always modified their behavior in response to new technology, especially modes of transportation. ‘If you look at the emergence of railroads, for the most part people have learned not to stand in front of a train on the tracks,’ he says…  Self-driving cars, he says, are no different.”

I wonder if we might not come to see the segregation of traffic as a feature and not a bug of AV technology. Imagine a future in which pedestrians, cyclists and users of motorised transport all had ample and, for the most part, separate space to make their way around our towns and cities.

How might that be possible? Take a look at this – it’s a visual demonstration of just how much extra road space cars need to transport a given of people compared to buses or bicycles. The basic spatial inefficiency of the car itself is compounded by low occupancy rates (an average of about 1.6 people per car in the UK). Then there’s the need to park the things for most of the day (average occupancy rate roughly zero) – taking up even more space on our roads and off them.

In theory, driverless cars could free up a lot of that space – by reducing driving distances between cars, reducing the need for parking spaces in city centres and facilitating car sharing schemes. However, this developmental pathway requires AV tech to be perfected first – in a complex, urban driving environment.

However, there is a plan B – in which the B stands for ‘bus’. We could already save the space currently wasted by cars if more people were willing to use public transport instead – which they might do if it were much cheaper and much faster.

Driverless bus technology could make that possible. With no drivers or conductors needed, staffing costs and constraints are greatly reduced – making smaller vehicles serving a larger number of routes economically viable. Compared to a new tram or train line, the necessary infrastructure (i.e. a simple road as opposed to tracks, junctions, signals etc) is affordable. Furthermore, even basic automation enables precision driving on narrow lanes, allowing the width required for dedicated, fenced-off, routes to be minimised. Routes free from all other kinds of traffic would greatly increase the speed and reliability of the services – and therefore their acceptability to the public as a replacement for their cars. And, of course, with a simplified driving environment we don’t have to wait for the most advanced level of automation to be developed.

Suggested reading

How the robots of the underworld could turn your life upside down

By Peter Franklin

As I’ve argued before, it would be easier to implement AV-based transit and traffic segregation in a new town or large-scale urban extension – where dedicated routes can be designed-in from the outset. However, it could be done in established communities too – with routes carved out of existing transportation corridors.

Full implementation of ‘plan B’ would require vision, courage and meticulous planning, but the prize would be an unpolluted, uncongested urban environment in which one could walk or cycle literally free from the fear of death.

Clayton in east Manchester is a world apart from the villages and small towns of Bloodworth’s native Somerset. The area is well-connected to the city centre – and a stone’s throw from the Etihad Stadium, home of Manchester City Football Club. And yet there are whole streets in the suburb that are all but abandoned.

Further reading

Left behind – life beyond the London bubble

By James Bloodworth

Osuh and Robson begin their report with a visit to one of the few remaining residents of Heather Street:

“Pete’s home is one of only three or four others on the street that are occupied. The rest are boarded up in brutal fashion.

“Windows and doors are covered with imposing metal grates or wooden plyboard covered in graffiti, with the occasional heavy-duty padlock added for good measure.

“And it’s not just on Heather Street.

“Both the next one along – Ben Street – and behind – Midlothian Street – are the same.

“Blighted by dozens and dozens of vacant properties, this is a neighbourhood that was at death’s door.”

These streets are just three miles drive from the centre of England’s second city (sorry, Birmingham). Can you imagine this happening three miles from the centre of London?

The root cause of the area’s decline is the old story of de-industrialisation. However, Manchester has been on the up for at least twenty years now:

“Manchester’s population has grown – leaping 28 per cent between 2001 and 2011. House prices are up 32.5 per cent in the last five years, according to Land Registry data – and younger workers want to live close to town, and are increasingly priced out of the suburbs and the city centre.”

So why haven’t places like Heather Street been reclaimed?

The basic problem is that neighbourhood decline and regeneration is an asymmetric process. The decline happens bit-by-bit, residents and landlords walking away from worthless properties one-by-one. Regeneration, however, requires a collective effort.

While a private individual may be able to renovate an abandoned property in an otherwise thriving street, they’d be ill-advised to do so in a street full of other abandoned properties. In the latter case, regeneration is an all-or-nothing proposition requiring major investment – most likely, public investment.

For Heather Street and its neighbours, that investment is now underway, but why did it take decades for the various branches of the state to get their act together?

What struck me reading the authors’ account of what happened (or, rather, what didn’t happen) was the lack of urgency on the part of those who should have got things moving. Clearly, there’s something lacking in the policy framework to prod the powers-that-be into action.

A land value tax (LVT) is exactly what it purports to be – a tax on the market value of a piece of land, not on what’s built on it. If implemented it would make sitting on a site – whether out of speculative expectation or mere indolence – prohibitively expensive. This is presented as a major advantage of the system: an LVT forces private landlords to redevelop poorly used land or sell it on to someone who will.

Further reading

Gen Z’s favorite rabbi

By Tom Copley

But what if dereliction is so widespread that individual landlords are powerless to make a difference? What if land values have fallen so far that not much LVT is payable anyway? How can LVT be made to drive regeneration in these circumstances?

In theory, the loss of LVT revenues would give the state an incentive to act to restore land values. In practice, however, bureaucratic inertia could win the day.

But what if land value taxes included a threshold land value below which they went negative – i.e. the state would have to pay the land owner? This would turn the opportunity cost of inaction into an actual cost – a much sharper incentive to get going on regeneration. There’d be an important condition attached to the negative LVT system, which is that the state would have the right to buy the property at its negatively taxable value – thus enabling it to assemble the land packages required to make a regeneration scheme work.

Finally, on the assumption that the system were administered by local government, I’d give each local authority the right to transfer its operation in a particular neighbourhood to central government – including the liability for negative LVT payments. This would give central government every reason to make sure that local government had the powers and capital required to regenerate left-behind communities – or to do the job itself.

Further reading

How to introduce a Land Value Tax tactfully

By Peter Franklin

One wonders why our ancestors went to such trouble. Cellars are useful, of course, especially in a continental climate of hot summers and cold winters; but to keep on digging downwards must have required a huge effort in an age before digging machinery. If they needed more space, why didn’t they just build a bigger house out of town?

The answer is that you had to be in town to benefit from the protection of city walls – and so when there was no more space at the surface, and houses had as many storeys as was feasible back then, the only other way was down.

In the global cities of the 21st century, the Middle Ages are back. Constrained not by city walls, but by property prices and planning restrictions, we’re digging down again.

Further reading

Should the rich be allowed to destroy their own wealth?

By Peter Franklin

In an article for the Guardian, Bradley L Garrett describes the land grab now taking place beneath our feet. Most notoriously, there’s the fashion for basement extensions in the posher part of central London:

“In London, a city with 150 years of trenching, digging and boring to its name, the chaos is reaching new depths. According to Newcastle University’s Global Urban Research Unit, more than 4,600 basements have been granted planning permission in the last decade – in just seven of London’s 32 boroughs…

“…Many of the basements contained cinemas, gymnasiums, pools, wine cellars and panic rooms. One even included plans for a subterranean beach with an accompanying waterfall.”

An especially weird aspect of these subterranean follies is that the diggers used to excavate them are often left behind. Having dug their way down into a confined space, the only way of getting them back up is by lifting them out with a crane – the costs and complications of which can be greater than buying a new digger. Therefore the last thing they do is dig their own graves to one side of the main development. That should be something for the archeologists of the future to puzzle over.

Technology, however, is moving on. Garrett mentions Elon Musk’s Boring Company – whose mission is to use tunnelling machines to create a 3D road network beneath Los Angeles. DARPA, the inventor of the internet, is also on the case:

“…the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (Darpa) is currently funding a “subterranean challenge”, soliciting bids for techniques to enhance “situational awareness” of global underground spaces, with a $2m prize. The challenge is to create machines that can make their way through tunnel systems, urban undergrounds and natural caves.”

Another initiative worth a mention is the EU’s BADGER programme which aims to develop an autonomous burrowing robot.

If these and other technologies succeed in bringing down the costs of exploring and excavating the ground beneath us, then a new dimension of urban development will open up. We could afford more of what we already construct below ground e.g. road tunnels, car parks, sewers etc; and also some revolutionary applications. How about basement extensions for the masses? Or ubiquitous ducting for public utilities so that the roads never have to be dug up again?

And here’s another one: The reason why it’s so hot on some London underground tube lines is because the energy generated when the trains break has accumulated as heat in the clay surrounding the tunnels. In over a century of operation the ambient temperatures have gone from 14°C to more than 20°C. If we had an affordable and precise way of running a heat exchange network around these tunnels, we could extract the energy and use it to provide heating at the surface. Cool!

Of course, as Garrett points out, we’re going to need 3D maps of our poorly documented sub-cities and we’re going to have to properly sort out who owns what underground.

However, assuming that the technology and the regulation comes together, the space beneath us may turn out to be more significant than the space above us.

Further reading

The false promise of the vertical city

By Peter Franklin